by Under a huge arch coronal loopa wealth of exotic solar phenomena active in the transition zone between the slower atmosphere unthe chromosphere, and the corona, recorded in this magical video by the European Space Agencyand Solar Orbit spaceship.
The view, recorded by the Solar Orbiter from a distance of just over 43 million kilometers (26.7 miles) from the sun, which reveals features on the solar surface that we could only dream of seeing 10 years ago. That’s because of Solar Orbiter and a NASA colleague, the Parker Solar Probewhich is designed to look at the sun from a much closer neighborhood than any other mission before them.
In fact, Solar Orbiter reached its closest point to the sun 10 days after this video was shot. Parker Solar Probe will reach its closest point, 6.9 million kilometers (4.3 million miles), on Christmas Eve later this year. This may still sound like a huge distance, but when you consider that the sun 1.39 million kilometers (864,600 miles) across, it’s not that long at all. In fact, it is so close that Parker Solar Probe will be at the edge of the corona and will survive a temperature of 1,377 degrees Celsius (2,500 degrees Fahrenheit).
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But back to Solar Orbiter. This video, filmed on September 27, 2023 with the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) shows several distinct types of features. The things to remember are that most of the sun’s activity is driven by the solar magnetism, and much of this activity involves temperatures so hot that it emits mainly ultraviolet light. As the film begins, the first noticeable feature you see is a bright patch on the lower left. This is called “crown moss”. They are commonly found at the base of the coronal loops, which are magnetic loops that penetrate from the visible surface of the sun (the photosphere) and form bridges across active regions that yield million-degree-hot plasma (ionized or electrified gas). Moss is named because when solar physicists first discovered it, it was a spongy-looking feature.
However, Solar Orbiter’s high-resolution vision shows that the moss is instead a tangle of lace-like plasma filaments that continue to spiral. magnetic field lines at the bottom of the loop, which is the location of “active region.” These regions are where sun spots also, although sunspots are too cool to see in the ultraviolet light of this video. The brightest regions in the moss radiate more than a million degrees.
On the horizon of the sun’s limbs we see dark spiky features. These hair-like structures are called spices, and are plasma jets 300 kilometers (185 miles) across that can reach heights of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) above the photosphere; they wave in time with the sun’s smooth oscillating magnetic field. As they ascend at between 15 kilometers per hour and 110 kilometers per hour (9 miles per hour and 68 miles per hour), the millions of spicules present on the sun at any one time inject enormous amounts of plasma into the chromosphere and in the crown.
Twenty seconds into the video, something else happens. You will see an eruption of cooler material that rises like a plume deep into the chromosphere before falling back towards the photosphere. The violence and scale of this outburst is amazing; it could be relatively similar to the rest of the sun, but that there is one eruption more than our entire Earth.
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Towards the end of the video, another inescapable solar phenomenon can be captured: coronal rain. Despite the name, this is not water. It is made of droplets formed from huge clumps of plasma, 10,000 degrees Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit) hot, falling out of the coronal loop and back onto the photosphere. The coronal rain appears dark only because, in contrast to the million-degree-hot corona around it, the rain is relatively cold, creating a contrasting effect similar to the dark sunspots.
What happens on the sun has far reaching consequences Solar systemalso, because much of the energy seen here in this video is released in the end space driving the solar wind, made of charged particles. This solar wind meets spacecraft, planets and moons, interacting with them (this is what causes the northern lights, for example). Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe are able to team up to study the solar wind, so it happened that when Solar Orbiter shot this video, Parker Solar Probe was only 7.26 million kilometers (4.51 million miles ) from the sun – Parker soon. felt the solar wind that left the sun after this activity was recorded. With Solar Orbiter investigating the source of the solar wind and where it gets its energy, and Parker Solar Probe measuring the wind’s gusts, solar physicists are able to get a clearer picture of how the solar wind forms and evolves over time. she flows from us. star.
