12/13/2023 0 Comments Nasa solar orbiter images![]() ![]() In the outermost part of the solar atmosphere, known as the corona, temperatures start to rise, reaching more than one million degrees C.įor years, scientists have been looking for an answer to this heating of the corona. Things get relatively cooler the further you move away from the center of the Sun - it’s a balmy 5,700 degrees C at the solar surface. Temperatures of the Sun's core can reach 15 million degrees Celsius. ![]() "We couldn't believe it when we first saw this." They do think that this newly observed phenomenon may be contributing to one of the Sun's unsolved mysteries - the heating of the Sun's corona. The scientists investigating the images are still not sure whether the "campfires" are driven by the same mechanism as the solar flares or if they are fueled entirely differently. "There is so much new small phenomena going on on the smallest scale." "We couldn't believe it when we first saw this and we started giving it crazy names like campfires and dark fibrils and ghosts and whatever we saw," Berghmans said during a press conference on Thursday. Spotting "campfires" - David Berghmans, a space physicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, and principal investigator of one of the instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, was not expecting much from the Solar Orbiter's initial set of data. The miniature solar flares, or campfires, are indicated by a white arrow at the top of the image, with the size of the Earth used to scale. In mid-June, the spacecraft completed its first perihelion, the point in orbit closest to the Sun, and used its six telescopes to capture the star in unprecedented detail. The Solar Orbiter travels in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, completing one orbit every 168 days. It's job: Getting up close and personal with our host star in order to resolve some of the lingering mysteries regarding the Sun's magnetic field, solar storms, and how the star affects its surrounding space environment. ![]() The spacecraft launched on February 9, 2020, with the Sun as its destination. The spacecraft's groundbreaking proximity to the star's surface enabled it to document miniatures solar flares - which scientists have dubbed "campfires." These images, released Thursday by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) mission, are a result of the spacecraft's first close approach to the Sun, which occurred in mid-June. These breathtaking shots reveal never before seen features on the solar surface. After traveling 48 million miles in outer space toward our nearest star, the Solar Orbiter has captured the closest-ever images of the Sun. ![]()
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