Lhe Solar Orbiter spacecraft was able to see in the foreground this week to the Sun emitting a flare unusually large, resulting in a unique image.
Solar Orbiter observed the solar prominence on February 15, according to a release of the European Space Agency. Solar prominences are clouds of solar gas that remain above the surface of the Sun’s magnetic field and often manifest as gigantic looping structures that last for days or even weeks. These events can give rise to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), in which the ejected gas travels through the Solar system. If they head for Earth, CMEs can mess up our technologies, like satellites just released.
Fortunately, this ejection was not aimed at the earth. Quite the opposite, actually. The images by Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of NASA and ESA, suggest what the bump it originated on the far side of the Sun from the spacecraft’s perspective.
This boss in particular it was incredible, since it was possible to see reaching at least 3.5 million kilometers highaccording to the ESA. From In fact, the ESA says it is “the largest event of its kind ever captured in a single field of view along with the solar disk.”an achievement that opens “new possibilities to see how events like these They connect with the solar disk.
The eruption was also detected by BepiColombo’s radiation monitor, which picked up juicy readings of electrons, protons and heavy ions. The ESA/JAXA spacecraft is currently in the vicinity of Mercury’s orbit. The SOHO spacecraft also captured the eruption, but from the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point. Unlike Solar Orbiter, SOHO, a collaboration of ESA and NASA, uses a device called an occulter to block the Sun’s glare, resulting in a large black dot in the center of the image.
Launched in February 2020, Solar Orbiter is using its 10 onboard instruments to capture unprecedented close-up views of the Sun. The probe used its Full Sun Imager (FSI) del instrumento Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) to capture this unique perspective of the Sun and its bulge.
Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Müller said the EUI/FSI observations showed that the prominent material extended to a distance equal to five times the radius of the Sun, “and can be traced much farther in the SOHO/LASCO coronagraph data,” as he explained to me in an email. Before the eruption, the “bulge it couldn’t be observed by Solar Orbiter or from near Earth because it was on the other side of the Sun, so we don’t know what the pre-eruption longitude was”, he added.
As its name implies, Full Sun Imager can capture views of the entire solar disk, and will continue to do so even whenSolar Orbiter will make its next perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, on March 26, when it reaches a 0.3 times the Sun-Earth distance.
Scientists will take a close look at this solar prominence using the aforementioned tools, as well as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. It’s great that we now have so many eyes on the Sun, as it is increasingly important for us to understand the processes behind these dramatic stellar events. of estIn this way, we will be able to better predict the effects of these explosions when they are directed at us..