The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft got a close look at the sun's corona in late ... [+]
You might not expect to find moss and rain on the sun, but a new video from the European Space Agency shows off some quirky features of our nearest star. The striking close-up video of the corona comes from ESA’s Solar Orbiter, a daring spacecraft designed to capture unprecedented images of the sun.
The corona is the sun’s outer atmosphere. The video shows hair-like strands of plasma (charged gas) that inspired ESA to refer to the corona as “fluffy.” “This otherworldly, ever-changing landscape is what the sun looks like up close,” ESA said in a statement on Thursday. The brightest areas are blazing hot—around 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit—while darker areas are cooler.
The video is short, but there’s a lot of activity. ESA annotated a series of solar features and events. “An intriguing feature visible throughout this movie is the bright gas that makes delicate, lace-like patterns across the sun,” the agency said. These patterns are called coronal moss. Next up are spicules, spikes of gas that reach upward from the sun’s atmosphere. An eruption appears near the center. The eruption looks small, but it’s bigger than Earth. The last highlight is coronal rain. “The rain is made of higher-density clumps of plasma that fall back towards the sun under the influence of gravity,” ESA said.
You can’t just slap a GoPro on a spacecraft and get views like this. Solar Orbiter uses a specialized instrument called the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. It can capture views of the whole sun or zoom in for dramatic closeups of the star’s atmosphere.
An artist's concept shows Solar Orbiter investigating the sun.
The video comes from late 2023 when Solar Orbiter was heading for a close approach of the sun. The spacecraft launched in early 2020 and began its routine science operations in late 2021. It’s on a mission to capture the closest-ever images of the sun and to investigate the star’s enigmatic and uncharted polar regions. Scientists are using Solar Orbiter to better understand the sun’s cycles, atmosphere, corona and solar wind—a stream of particles constantly emanating from the sun.
Solar Orbiter has a sun exploration buddy out there in space. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is also studying the solar wind. Parker even flew through the sun’s corona in 2021. The two spacecraft have worked together to measure and track the solar wind, which reaches through the solar system. “When gusts of solar wind arrive at Earth, they can set off dazzling aurora—but also expose astronauts to radiation, interfere with satellite electronics, and disrupt communications signals like GPS and radio waves,” said NASA in an explainer. “The more we understand the fundamental processes that drive the solar wind, the more we can mitigate some of these effects.”
When we look at the sun through eclipse glasses from Earth, it looks like a static ball of light. Solar Orbiter’s pioneering views give us a glimpse of what’s really going on up there in the active corona region.
