ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission has managed to film the transition from the Sun’s lower atmosphere to the much hotter outer corona.
Hair-like structures They are made of charged gas (plasma), following the magnetic field lines that emerge from the interior of the Sun, as seen in the video produced by ESA.
The brightest regions are around a million degrees Celsius, while cooler material appears dark because it absorbs radiation.
This video was recorded on September 27, 2023 by the instrument Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). At that time, the spacecraft was approximately a third of the distance from Earth to the Sun, and was heading for a closest approach of 43 million kilometers on October 7.
On the same day this video was recorded, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe traveled just 7.26 million kilometers from the solar surface. Instead of imaging directly from the Sun, Parker measures particles and magnetic field in the solar corona and solar wind. This was a perfect opportunity for the two missions to team up, with the remote sensing instruments of the ESA-led Solar Orbiter observing the source region of the solar wind that would later pass by the Parker Solar Probe.
An intriguing feature visible throughout this film (in the lower left corner) is the glowing gas that forms delicate lace-like patterns around the Sun. This is called coronal “moss”. It usually appears around the base of large coronal loops that are too hot or too faint to be seen with the chosen instrument settings.
On the solar horizon gas needles, known as spicules, can be seen which rise from the chromosphere of the Sun and can reach a height of 10,000 kilometers.
Around second 22 of the video highlights a small rash in the center of the field of visionwith cooler material rising upward before falling back down. This eruption is larger than Earth.
In the center left, around the 30th second, “cold” coronal rain is seen (probably less than 10,000 °C) that appears dark against the bright background of large coronal loops (about a million degrees). Rain is formed by accumulations of higher density plasma that fall towards the Sun under the influence of gravity.
