![]() Investigating this mystery is one of the key scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter. But above the Sun, the corona reaches a million degrees Celsius whereas the surface is only about 5000☌. Usually the temperature drops as you move away from a hot object. These ‘prominences’ are prone to erupt, throwing huge quantities of coronal gas into space and creating ‘space weather’ storms. ![]() This reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius.Īt the 2 o’clock (near the image of the Earth for scale) and 8 o’clock positions on the edges of the Sun, dark filaments can be seen projecting away from the surface. For comparison, this image has a resolution that is ten times better than what a 4K TV screen can display.ĮUI images the Sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes, including the time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next. The high-resolution telescope of EUI takes pictures of such high spatial resolution that, at that close distance, a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, half way between our world and its parent star.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |