A handout picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows a view of the Sun taken by the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) Full Disc Telescope on ESA’s Solar Orbiter on 18 June 2020 (issued 17 July 2020).
This is a visible light image and represents what we would see with the naked eye. There are no sunspots visible because the Sun is displaying only low levels of magnetic activity at the moment.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA.
These are the closest images ever taken of the sun.
The Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency satellite, took the pictures when it came within 47 million miles of the sun’s surface in mid-June.
The Solar Orbiter will also help scientists piece together the sun’s atmospheric layers and analyse the solar wind – the stream of highly energetic particles emitted by the star.
This could help scientists make predictions on space weather events which can damage orbiting satellites and disrupt infrastructure on earth that mobile phones, transport, GPS signals and electricity networks rely on.
A handout picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) of a full disc image showing a map of magnetic propertied for the whole Sun based on data from the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) on ESA’s Solar Orbiter, taken on 18 June 2020 (issued 17 July 2020). In the image there is a large magnetically active region in the lower right-hand quadrant of the Sun.(COMPOSITE) An undated handout composite picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the solar atmosphere below the hot corona produced by the high resolution imager, HRILYA telescope, which is part of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft (issued 17 July 2020). The violet colour has been artificially added to help visual identification of this region. The images show the solar surface in a particular ultraviolet wavelength that is produced by hydrogen, the most abundant chemical element in the Universe. The wavelength is known as Lyman-alpha and has a wavelength of 121.6 nm. Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. EPA-EFE/SOLAR ORBITER/EUI TEAM/ ESA & NASA CSL, IAS, MPS, PMOD/WRC, ROB, UCL/MSSL HANDOUT
