Feast Your Eyes on ‘Unprecedented’ New Pics Revealed of Our Sun
28 MARCH 2022
A spacecraft that just skimmed the Sun has delivered the highest-resolution image yet of our home star’s full disk and atmosphere.
On 7 March, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter took the image with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) when it was at a distance of just 75 million kilometers (46.6 million miles) – half the distance between Earth’s average orbit and the Sun.
At that distance, the spacecraft needed to take 25 different images, each a nearly 10-minute exposure, which had to be stitched together into a mosaic to construct the full image. The result is a 9,148 by 9,112 pixel extravaganza. That’s 83 million pixels of solar magnificence.
The result is incredible: a fully zoomable image that allows you to pore over fine details of the solar surface and corona (atmosphere), including several solar 'prominences’ around the edge of the disk that sometimes erupt and eject massive amounts of plasma into space. [Image on website.] …
… The EUI is just one of the spacecraft’s instruments. When studying the Sun, it’s helpful to look at a range of wavelengths, since different atoms emit light differently. The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument is designed for this granular detail; while the EUI was imaging the Sun, so too was SPICE collecting mosaics of its own.
SPICE collected data in four extreme ultraviolet wavelengths: 102.5 nanometers, emitted by hydrogen at 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit); 97.7 nanometers, emitted by carbon at 32,000 degrees Celsius; 103.2 nanometers, emitted by oxygen at 320,000 degrees Celsius; and 77.0 nanometers, emitted by neon at 630,000 degrees Celsius.
The hydrogen image is the first full image of
the Sun of its kind in 50 years, and absolutely the best, so you can
guarantee solar scientists are going to be bouncing in their seats to
study it. …