Solar probe reveals sun's tiny 'campfires' in closest-ever photos !

A solar probe built by the European Space Agency and NASA has delivered the closest photos ever taken of the sun's surface, revealing a landscape rife with thousands of tiny solar flares that scientists dubbed "campfires" and offering clues about the extreme heat of the outermost part of its atmosphere

The spacecraft, launched from Florida in February, snapped the images in late May using the probe's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager as it orbited nearly 48 million miles (77 million km) from the sun's surface, or roughly halfway between the sun and Earth.

The "campfires" are believed to be tiny explosions, called nanoflares, and could explain why the sun's outer shield, the corona, is 300 times hotter than the star's surface. Scientists are awaiting more data from the spacecraft's other instruments to know for sure.

Scientists typically have relied upon Earth-based telescopes for close-ups of the sun's surface. But Earth's atmosphere limits the amount of visible light needed to glean views as intimate as those obtained by the Solar Orbiter.The spacecraft also carries plasma-sampling instruments to offer researchers further data.

Solar Orbiter's primary mission of examining the sun's polar regions will help researchers understand the origins of the solar wind, charged particles that blast through our solar system and affect satellites and electronics on Earth.

Solar Orbiter has been set on a series of loops around the Sun that will gradually take it closer still - ultimately to a separation of less than 43 million km.That will put SolO inside the orbit of the planet Mercury.The pictures showcased on Thursday come from the most recent near pass, known as perihelion. This occurred in mid-June, inside the orbit of Venus.

For comparison, Earth sits about 149 million km (93 million miles) on average from the Sun.To be clear while the new images have been taken from the closest ever vantage point, they are not the highest resolution ever acquired. The largest solar telescopes on Earth will always beat SolO on that measure.But the probe's holistic approach, using the combination of six remote sensing instruments and four in-situ instruments, puts it on a different level.

Solar Orbiter isn't going closer to the Sun just to get higher-resolution images: it's going closer to get into a different, less turbulent part of the solar wind, studying the particles and magnetic field in situ at that closer distance, while simultaneously taking remote data on the surface of the Sun and immediately around it for context. No other mission or telescope can do that.

As the mission progresses, SolO will, with the gravitational assistance of Venus, also lift itself out of the plane of the planets so that it can more easily see the Sun's poles. "Terra incognita", as Sami Solanki, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and PI on Solo's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager, likes to call these regions.

This 10-year time lapse of the Sun at 17.1 nanometers (an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer – the corona) shows the rise and fall of the solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and solar eruptions.

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO