Solar Orbiter Captures Closest Images of the Sun; Reveals Presence of Millions of ‘Campfires’ – The Weather Channel

Solar Orbiter spots campfires on the Sun. Locations of campfires are annotated with white arrows.

NASA and ESA have released the first images of the Solar Orbiter, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun. These images were captured when the spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June this year.

These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained, said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

He further added: 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.

Launched on February 10, 2020, the Solar Orbiter mission has carried several cutting-edge instruments to monitor the environment of the Earths closest star. Aboard the Orbiter are six remote-sensing instruments, or telescopes, to snap images of the Sun and its surroundings, along with four other in-situ instruments.

Through this mission, scientists aim to gain an in-depth understanding of the solar wind, and how it releases the stream of charged particles that influence the entire Solar System.

The first images from the mission detail the presence of millions of miniature-size solar flaresalso referred to as 'campfires'near the surface of the Sun. NASA describes solar flares as sudden explosions of energy caused by the tangling, crossing, or reorganising of magnetic field lines near sunspots.

The images were captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on May 30, 2020, from a distance of 77 million km from the Sun. During this time, the Solar Orbiter was at the periheliona point in its elliptical orbit measured to be closest to the Sunwhich is roughly half the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

The EUI is programmed to take high-resolution images of the solar coronathe outermost layer of the Suns atmospherewhich usually remains unexposed due to the bright light of the Suns surface and is, therefore, difficult to capture.

The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller, said David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), Principal Investigator of the EUI instrument in an official statement. The Sun might look quiet at first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look, he added.

Meanwhile, space scientists are still trying to understand if these campfires are just smaller versions of solar flares or a different phenomenon altogether.

Scientists have, however, hypothesised that these campfires may be the reason behind coronal heating. The corona layer is the part of Suns upper atmosphere, which burns at temperature worth millions of degrees. This layer also extends to millions of kilometres into the outer space.

With the help of more Orbiter data, scientists are aiming to demystify the mysterious coronal heating phenomenon and figure out what causes the corona to be so hota problem considered to be among the most vexing in astrophysics.

For weather, science & COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store). It's free!