Solar Orbiter took images of the sun on 7 March, from a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, using its Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. These too needed to be pieced together as a mosaic. ![]() In addition to EUI, the SPICE instrument was also recording data during the crossing. 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. Pelouze (IAS)ĮUI images the sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE team Data processing: G. It represents the best full Sun image taken at the Lyman beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas. Each full-Sun image is made up of a mosaic of 25 individual scans. Purple corresponds to hydrogen gas at a temperature of 10 000☌, blue to carbon at 32 000☌, green to oxygen at 320 000☌, yellow to neon at 630 000☌. The different wavelengths recorded correspond to different layers in the Sun’s lower atmosphere. SPICE takes simultaneous “spectral images” at several different wavelengths of the extreme ultraviolet spectrum by scanning its spectrometer slit across a region on the Sun. Solar Orbiter took images of the Sun on 7 March, from a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, using its Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. For comparison, this image has a resolution that is ten times better than what a 4K TV screen can display. 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 kilometers, half way between our world and its parent star. One of the images, taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) is the highest resolution image of the sun's full disk and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.Īnother image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument represents the first full sun image of its kind in 50 years, and by far the best one, taken at the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas.
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