The new image of the sun is different from anything we have seen before

Filled with 83 million pixels, the mosaic image provides an unprecedented view of the sun and its turbulent outer atmosphere.

It took the Solar Orbiter about four hours to capture all 25 images that comprise it mosaicwho shows the sun On March 7, 2022. At the time, the probe was 46 million miles (75 million km) from the Sun, which put it about halfway between earth and staraccording to the European Space Agency press release. Launched in February 2020, the Solar Orbiter performs a series of eccentric solar orbits as it increasingly approaches our host star.

The 25 frames, captured by the probe’s Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, provide an unprecedented view of the Sun. EUI captured the image at a wavelength of 17 nm, The extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The European Space Agency says it is the highest image ever taken of the full sun’s disk and the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere.

High accuracy, in fact. The stunning mosaic image consists of a grid of 9148 x 91112 pixels, which the European Space Agency says is 10 Times better than a 4K TV. This amounts to 83 million pixels. ESA submitted a file interactive drawing It allows you to move across the scene, and you can zoom in and out to capture some of the finer details. A high-resolution image can be found, which I am already using as my desktop background here.

In both the upper right and lower left, frightening dark threads could be seen. These filaments can generate powerful explosions, as massive amounts of coronal gas fall into space. These explosions, if directed towards Earth, sometimes creating solar storms in the vicinity of our atmosphere.

Another tropical solar-powered instrument, the Spectral Environment Coronal Imaging (SPICE), also provides useful data. SPICE looks deeper into the sun, at a lower layer known as the chromosphere, and it does so by scanning different wavelengths of intense ultraviolet radiation produced by different atoms.

In Spice Newly Released gifthe purple regions correspond to hydrogen gas at temperatures up to 18,000°F (10,000°C), green to oxygen at 576,000°F (320,000°C), and yellow to neon at 1.13 million degrees Fahrenheit (630,000 degrees Celsius).

A big benefit of SPICE is that it allows scientists to relate surface eruptions to these deeper layers And to investigate the curious observation that the surface of the Sun is at about 9,000°F (5,000°C) colder than the ocean. The corona, which can reach 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (one million degrees Celsius).

Excitingly, the Solar Orbiter Now days away from making it The first pass close to the sunwhich will happen on March 26, 2022. All 10 Many of the probe’s instruments will be active at that time, as European Space Agency (ESA) scientists try to extract as much data as possible from the flyby. The solar orbit is now in an orbit that brings it closer to the sun than Mercury. The probe will gradually approach Over the next several years, as its direction gradually raised, which would allow us to glimpse the polar regions of the Sun.