The Solar Orbiter mission takes the most impressive images of the Sun yet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has ordered Solar Orbiter mission what has he achieved reveal full views belonging visible surface of the Sun (photosphere) with the highest resolution achieved to date. Likewise, this milestone was made possible by the spacecraft’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), an instrument that not only takes visible light images but also measures the direction of the magnetic field and maps the speed and direction in which different parts of the surface are moving.

PHI’s photosphere measurements can be directly compared to a new image of the Sun’s outer atmosphere (corona), compiled from high-resolution images taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on the same day in March 2023. EUI makes images. The sun in ultraviolet light. “The magnetic field of the Sun key to understanding the dynamic nature of our star

from the smallest to the largest scale. These new high-resolution maps from PHI Solar Orbiter show the beauty of the Sun’s surface magnetic field and fluxes in exquisite detail. At the same time, they are crucial for determining the magnetic field in the hot corona of the Sun, which our EUI instrument detects,” he said in a statement. Daniel MullerResearcher for the Solar Orbiter Project.

This release follows one two years ago when the mission released complete images of the Sun from the spacecraft’s EUI and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments on March 7, 2022. Detailed visible light image of PHI released. “surface” of the Sun just like this: bright and hot plasma (charged gas) that is constantly moving. Almost all solar radiation comes from this layer, whose temperature ranges from 4500 to 6000 °C. Below, in the Sun’s “convection zone,” hot, dense plasma bubbles, similar to the magma in the Earth’s mantle. As a result of this movement, the surface of the Sun takes on a grainy appearance.

However, the most striking features of the images are sunspots. In a visible light image, they appear as dark spots or holes on a smooth surface. Sunspots are cooler than their surroundings and therefore they emit less light.

Magnetic card FI, or ‘magnetogram

‘, shows that Magnetic field of the Sun HE concentrated in sunspot regions. Move your cursor outward (red) or inward (blue) where the sunspots are. The strong magnetic field explains why the plasma inside sunspots is cooler. Normally, convection transfers heat from the Sun’s interior to its surface, but this is modified by charged particles that are forced to follow dense magnetic field lines in and around sunspots.

The speed and direction of movement of material on the surface of the Sun can be seen on the PHI velocity map, also known as a “tachogram”. Blue color shows movement towards the spaceship, and red color shows movement away from it. This map shows that although plasma on the Sun’s surface normally rotates with the Sun’s overall rotation on its axis, it is pushed outward around sunspots. Finally, an EUI image of the solar corona. shows what is happening above the photosphere. Protruding bright plasma is visible above the active regions of sunspots. The million-degree plasma follows the magnetic field lines emanating from the Sun, often connecting adjacent sunspots.

The pictures were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometers from the Sun. Being so close to the Sun, this meant that each high-resolution image taken by PHI and EUI only captured a small part of the Sun. After each individual image was taken, the spacecraft had to be tilted and rotated until every part of the Sun’s surface was captured. The sun was photographed.

To obtain the presented full disk images, they had to be stitched. all images are in mosaic form. The PHI and EUI mosaic consists of 25 images each, captured over four hours. The Sun’s disk measures nearly 8,000 pixels in diameter when fully mosaiced, revealing an incredible amount of detail. The image processing required to produce PHI mosaics was new and complex. Now that this has been done once, data processing and tile assembly will be faster in the future. The PHI team hopes to provide this type of high-resolution mosaic twice a year.