Solar Orbiter mission shares closest ever images of the sun

A joint mission from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has yielded photos released today taken at 77 million km from the Sun’s surface, the closest pictures yet.

The Solar Orbiter launched in February and the photos were taken on May 30 at the spacecraft’s perihelion, which is the point in its elliptical orbit when it is closest to the Sun. For reference, the photos were taken about halfway between the Earth and the Sun.

“These are only the first images and we can already see interesting new phenomena,” says Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter Project Scientist in a statement. “We didn’t really expect such great results right from the start. We can also see how our ten scientific instruments complement each other, providing a holistic picture of the Sun and the surrounding environment.”

The images show the corona, the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, teeming with thousands of miniature solar flares, which the scientists have dubbed ‘campfires.’ These fires are millions of times smaller than the flares we can see from Earth, which are eruptions thought to be caused by goings-on within the Sun’s magnetic fields.

One theory from the team is that the combined effect of this many campfires contributes to the corona’s heat. The corona is much hotter than the Sun’s surface, and the reason why has long been a mystery among researchers.