The closest images ever captured of the Sun show what scientists are calling campfires on the stars surface.

These first images from the Solar Orbiter mission were released to the public today, July 16. They were captured in mid-June when the spacecraft was roughly halfway between Earth and the Sun, NASA said in a news release. The campfires seen in the images could be nanoflares, but more data is needed to know for sure.

The mission, which launched on Feb. 9, is an international collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to study Earths closest star.

These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Suns atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system, said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist.

The early images indicate that the mission is off to an excellent start, said Daniel Mller, ESAs Solar Orbiter project scientist.

The spacecraft made its first close solar pass on June 15. As it flew within 48 million miles of the Sun, all 10 instruments flicked on, and Solar Orbiter snapped the closest pictures of the star to date. (Other spacecraft have been closer, but none have carried Sun-facing imagers.)

The spacecraft has six imaging instruments that each study a different aspect of the Sun. Normally, the first images from a mission confirm the instruments are working; scientists dont expect new discoveries from them, according to NASA. In this case, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, returned data hinting at solar features never observed before.

Scientists are pointing out what they call campfires dotting the Suns surface in the EUI images.

The closest images ever captured of the Sun show what scientists are calling campfires on the stars surface. The Solar Orbiter is a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency to study the Sun.NASA/European Space Agency

The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller, said principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.

Its not yet clear what these campfires are but they could be mini-explosions known as nanoflares tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the Suns outer atmosphere, known as the corona, to a temperature 300 times hotter than the solar surface.

To know for sure, scientists need measurements of the campfires' temperature. Fortunately, there is an instrument on Solar Orbiter to do that: The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment, or SPICE instrument.

Were eagerly awaiting our next data set, said Frdric Auchre, principal investigator for SPICE operations at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France. The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.

The images seen in the animation at the top of the article consist of a series of views captured with several remote-sensing instruments on Solar Orbiter between May 30-June 21, when the spacecraft was roughly halfway between the Earth and the Sun closer to the Sun than any other solar telescope has ever been before.

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Closest images of the Sun to date show campfires on surface - MLive.com