Orbiter’s early photos deliver better look at the sun’s ‘campfires’

The European Space Agency and NASA are zooming toward the sun, releasing new photos that provide the closest look yet.

The two agencies launched Solar Orbiter into space Feb. 9. It’s studying how the sun creates its giant bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields, called the heliosphere, that is blown outward and across the entire solar system.

Researchers didn’t expect results this quick, but early photos have identified “campfires” dotting the sun — hinting at a solar feature that, until now, has not been observed in such detail.

“The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, said in a news release. “When looking at the new high-resolution (Extreme Ultraviolet Imager) images, they are literally everywhere we look.”

It’s not yet clear what these campfires are, but it’s possible they are mini explosions known as nanoflares. These are tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, to a temperature that’s 300 times hotter than the solar surface, according to the news release.

Scientists will need the campfires’ temperatures to know for sure. The Solar Orbiter has an instrument that can obtain this when it gets even closer to the sun.

“So we’re eagerly awaiting our next data set,” principal investigator Frédéric Auchère with the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, said in a news release. “The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.”

The Solar Orbiter is operated by the European Space Operations Centre in Germany. Of its 10 instruments, nine were provided by the ESA and its member states. NASA provided the other instrument, as well as hardware and sensors for three other instruments, and the Atlas V 411 rocket that launched the Solar Orbiter.

ESA / NASA / AFP via Getty Images This recent image of the sun was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager from the Solar Orbiter. The circle at lower left indicates the size of the Earth for scale.