Solar Orbiter takes the largest image of our sun to date
ESA has compiled the largest image of our sun to date from 200 individual images taken by the Solar Orbiter. It shows the star in ultraviolet light.
A scaled-down version of the mosaic
(Image: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, E. Kraaikamp (ROB)/CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Europe's space probe for exploring the sun has taken the largest image of our home star to date. The mosaic now presented was assembled from a total of 200 high-resolution detailed images of the sun taken by the Solar Orbiter on 9 March from a distance of 77 million kilometers, according to the European Space Agency ESA. The complete image has a resolution of 12,544 × 12,544 pixels and shows what the sun looks like in the ultraviolet spectrum of light – at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometers. In concrete terms, this shows the solar corona, which consists of hot, charged particles trapped in the magnetic field.
Immense effort required
Although the Solar Orbiter can also image the sun completely with several instruments, the resolution of these images is much lower. As the ESA now explains, for the new image, the Solar Orbiter aligned the so-called Full Sun Imager successively to partial areas of the sun and then took six high-resolution and two wide-angle images. The huge mosaic was then put together from all the resulting images. The fact that several images were available for each viewing angle improved the brightness and sharpness of the image.
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The Solar Orbiter was launched at the beginning of 2020 and has been orbiting our home star in ever-closer orbits ever since. However, the probe will not come as close to the sun as NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which is on a similar mission. The shortest planned distance of the solar orbiter is 42 million kilometers (or 0.28 AU). Due to a deflection at Venus, the probe is now leaving the orbital plane in which all planets orbit the sun. As a result, it will soon be the first probe ever to be able to photograph the sun up close from above or below. In the course of the mission, it will later achieve an even greater orbital inclination.
(mho)
