A new record-breaking set of images of the sun captured by the Solar Orbiter probe during its close pass of the star in March has been released, revealing a plethora of never-before-seen details, including a curious geyser of gas scientists have nicknamed the "solar hedgehog."
During the pass, which took Solar Orbiter as close as one-third of the sun-Earth distance, the spacecraft also glimpsed the sun's south pole. It was the first time that any telescope, space- or Earth-based, had captured such detailed images of this region of the #sun.
The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager is responsible for the most stunning images captured by the spacecraft. The camera reveals in high resolution phenomena in the lower layers of the sun's atmosphere, the region responsible for the generation of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which are outbursts of magnetized plasma from the outer atmosphere, known as the corona.
Among the never-before-seen phenomena captured around the close pass on March 26 was a strange geyser of hot and cold gas emanating from the sun's surface in all directions that the scientists dubbed the "solar hedgehog."
Stretching 15,500 miles (25,000 kilometers), twice the diameter of Earth, the "hedgehog" covers a small fraction of the sun's diameter of 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) but is much larger than the country-sized mini solar flares called campfires discovered during the spacecraft's first close pass at the sun.
The images of the sun's south pole taken during the close pass are of special interest to scientists studying the behavior of the sun and its 11-year-long cycle of activity. In the later part of the mission, the spacecraft's operators will tilt the spacecraft's orbit out of the ecliptic plane, in which planets orbit, to allow it to get a more direct view of the poles, something that has never been done before.
#SolarOrbiter will make its next close pass at the sun on Oct. 13.
Materials: ESA
