New photos of the Sun show previously unseen details of the star and could be useful for scientific research. The images were captured approximately a month ago and recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA).
It was from the Solar Orbiter satellite —the result of a joint space mission between ESA and NASA (the American space agency)— that the images were taken. At the time of capture, the satellite was halfway between the Earth and the Sun, at a distance of approximately 75 million km.
The images were captured by two telescopes on the Solar Orbiter.
One of them was the EUI (Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, in Portuguese), which captured the highest resolution photo of the entire Sun and the so-called corona, the outer atmosphere of the celestial body.
The image is so large that it took more than four hours to fully capture. In the end, it has more than 83 million pixels — a resolution that exceeds ten times the quality that a 4K screen can display.
Photo details can be viewed on the ESA website.
The other piece of equipment that contributed to the surprising images was the Spice (a telescope for spectral images of the coronal environment), which manages to capture the different atmospheric layers of the Sun, going from the corona to the chromosphere, the part that approaches the surface of the star.
According to ESA, these new images that consider the varied strata of the solar atmosphere can collaborate with scientists looking to understand eruptions that happen in the corona through the lower atmospheric layers.
Furthermore, the photos can be useful to understand the phenomenon of why the temperature keeps rising in some layers of the solar atmosphere.
Currently, the Solar Orbiter is orbiting Mercury and continues to image the Sun. The satellite is also watching the solar winds, from particles leaving the star.
For the future, however, expectations are higher: the Solar Orbiter is expected to come very close to the Sun and also to capture images of the polar regions, which have not yet been recorded.
