A spacecraft from the European Space Agency has captured new video of the sun’s surface, showing plasma swirling on the star’s “otherworldly” surface, according to a news release from the organization.The ESA said the images were captured by the Solar Orbiter, which was launched in February 2020 and has spent the past several years releasing images from its place near the sun. The orbiter has also taken the closest-ever images of the sun and its polar regions, the ESA said online.The new images were taken when the orbiter “filmed the transition from the Sun’s lower atmosphere to the much hotter outer corona” on Sept. 27, 2023, the ESA said. In the video, the surface of the sun appears furred with dark yellow material as beams of gold swoop overhead. The hair-like structures are made of plasma, which follow the magnetic fields that emerge from the interior of the sun. The swooping structures are spicules, spires of gas that can reach a height of more than 6,000 miles. The “exquisite detail” of the images is unlike previous photos of the area.[embedded content]Visible in the lower left corner of the video is a feature that the ESA calls “coronal ‘moss,'” which typically appears at the base of objects that are too hot to be seen with cameras.Beyond the structures, the orbiter even captured an eruption on the sun’s surface. The event appears small, appearing in the middle of the video around the 20-second mark, but the ESA said the eruption is bigger than Earth. During the eruption, cooler mat …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnA spacecraft from the European Space Agency has captured new video of the sun’s surface, showing plasma swirling on the star’s “otherworldly” surface, according to a news release from the organization.The ESA said the images were captured by the Solar Orbiter, which was launched in February 2020 and has spent the past several years releasing images from its place near the sun. The orbiter has also taken the closest-ever images of the sun and its polar regions, the ESA said online.The new images were taken when the orbiter “filmed the transition from the Sun’s lower atmosphere to the much hotter outer corona” on Sept. 27, 2023, the ESA said. In the video, the surface of the sun appears furred with dark yellow material as beams of gold swoop overhead. The hair-like structures are made of plasma, which follow the magnetic fields that emerge from the interior of the sun. The swooping structures are spicules, spires of gas that can reach a height of more than 6,000 miles. The “exquisite detail” of the images is unlike previous photos of the area.[embedded content]Visible in the lower left corner of the video is a feature that the ESA calls “coronal ‘moss,'” which typically appears at the base of objects that are too hot to be seen with cameras.Beyond the structures, the orbiter even captured an eruption on the sun’s surface. The event appears small, appearing in the middle of the video around the 20-second mark, but the ESA said the eruption is bigger than Earth. During the eruption, cooler mat …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
