(ORDO NEWS) — The European Space Agency has published a video taken by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.
On it you can see the solar corona in motion. Each video pixel covers 105 kilometers of the star’s surface.
The moment of closest approach occurred on October 12, when Solar Orbiter was only 29% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The agency says that the device transmitted data at a higher resolution than ever before.
Solar corona
The video was taken on October 13 by the Space Ultraviolet Imaging Camera. In this case, the atmosphere of the star is in a calm state.
Each pixel of the video covers 105 kilometers of the Sun.
This means that if the device looked at the Earth from such a distance, our entire planet would have a width of only 120 pixels. In this image, 17 lands will fit one next to the other.
The solar corona is the outer atmosphere of a star. It has temperatures up to a million degrees.
An electrically charged gas, plasma, is in constant motion, guided and accelerated by changes in the Sun’s magnetic field.
Vaults of bright plasma are held in place by loops of magnetism that erupt into the corona from within.
The sun is approaching its peak activity, known as solar maximum, in 2025. Thus, in the next few years, species of the calm corona will become rare.
Recall that recently a powerful solar flare disrupted the radio in Africa and the Middle East.
Scientists constantly monitor our star and in early September took stunning photos of the Sun using the most powerful solar telescope in the world.
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