THE SUN’S ON FIRE!
Incredible close-up photo taken by a spacecraft shows miniature solar flares dubbed ‘campfires’
WITH tongues of ‘flame’ licking right across its surface, this is the face of the sun – up close and personal.
The incredible image, taken by a spacecraft and revealed for the first time, is the most close-range photo of our star to date.
It reveals a series of ‘miniature’ solar flares on the surface, which scientists compared to ‘campfires’.
The €300million Solar Orbiter, which was built by Airbus in Hertfordshire, England, has flown within 75million kilometres of the sun.
Launched by the European Space Agency, it captured a series of images from between the orbits of Venus and Mercury in mid-June to show the extraordinary levels of heat, at different points, that are generated by the sun.
Dr David Long, the mission’s co-principal investigator, from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: ‘No images have been taken of the sun at such a close distance before and the level of detail they provide is impressive.
‘They show miniature flares across the surface of the sun, which look like campfires that are millions of times smaller than the solar flares that we see from Earth.’ These mini flares – that are still actually the size of an average country – might play a role in a mysterious phenomenon called coronal heating, whereby the sun’s outer layer, or corona, becomes 200 to 500 times hotter than the layers below, Dr Long explained. Another photo, in which the sun energy appears produced to be by violet, hydrogen shows gas at temperatures between 10,000 and 100,000 degrees. This energy is usually invisible to the human eye but has been revealed by an ExtremeUltraviolet Imaging telescope. The scientists are now looking forward to further investigations as the Solar Orbiter gets closer to the sun. A better understanding of how the sun works could help to guard the Earth against solar storms. These explosions on the sun – called coronal mass ejections – trigger surges of electrical current when they hit the Earth’s magnetic field and can wreak havoc on telephone wires, satellites, long-distance planes and power stations. The last incident of this kind occurred in 1859, causing telegraph wires to catch fire.