Solar rain, explosions and the sun’s thin ‘crown’ recorded by the solar lander: a bizarre landscape at a million degrees Celsius [video]

The strange spectacle of the sun is revealed through the footage Which sent the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

Images from the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft reveal winged, capillary-like structures of plasma, while also recording bursts and rain of relatively cooler material falling to the surface.

Observing the Sun’s complex surface dynamics could help solve the question of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere (known as the corona) is hotter than its surface – a long-standing paradox in heliophysics, scientists say.

The brightest areas have a temperature of about 1,000,000°C, while the cooler material, below 10,000°C, appears darker. The footage was captured on September 27, 2023 by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, when the spacecraft was about a third of Earth’s distance from the Sun.

The video below highlights delicate lace-like patterns all around the sun, colloquially called “algae.” These structures appear around the base of large coronal magnetic field loops. On the horizon, plumes of gas, known as spicules, extend from the sun’s heliosphere to an altitude of about 10,000 km.

A small explosion can be seen in the center of the field of view, with cold material rising to the top before most of it falls to the bottom. Although small in size compared to larger events, this explosion is still larger than Earth.

The material also reveals coronal rain, which appears dark at temperatures below 10,000°C against the bright background of large coronal annulus (about 1,000,000°C). Rain consists of masses of high-density plasma that fall toward the sun under the influence of gravity.

“It’s really beautiful when you see it happen,” said Dr. David Long, a solar physicist at Dublin City University and Solar Orbiter scientist. “It comes and goes — you see showers of it around solar flares.”

The observations could help explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is more than 150 times hotter than its surface, or more than a million degrees Celsius.

The corona is expected to be cooler because the Sun’s energy comes from the nuclear furnace at its core, and things naturally get cooler the farther away they are from the heat source. One explanation is that small flares, called campfires, pull energy into the atmosphere to heat the corona.

Next year the mission will begin emerging from the planetary plane to take a first look at the sun’s uncharted north and south poles.

source: European Space AgencyWatchman

A spacecraft from the Far East orbits the moon: the Chinese collect samples from the dark side, the Japanese take pictures from the front [videos]

Follow Hellas Journal on Google News