A spacecraft has spied a spiky “hedgehog” on the solar and watched a photo voltaic flare in methods by no means finished earlier than.
The Solar Orbiter, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, launched in February 2020 and is now looping round our star (SN: 2/9/20). On May 18, researchers launched photos from the spacecraft’s closest photo voltaic flyby but. That flyby occurred March 26 when the orbiter flew inside about 48 million kilometers of the solar, nearer than Mercury is.
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“This is amazing to have this sort of data already,” says photo voltaic physicist David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels.
The observations present a characteristic nicknamed the hedgehog, as a result of its spikes of darker, cooler fuel atop hotter materials. “‘Cool’ is relative here, with respect to the 1-million-degree background [plasma],” says Berghmans, the principal investigator of the orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. The scientists don’t know what causes this characteristic, however assume it’s associated to lengthy, skinny jets of photo voltaic materials known as spicules (SN: 11/14/19).
Several days earlier than spying the 25,000-kilometer-wide hedgehog, 4 of Solar Orbiter’s devices detected an X-ray flare and noticed the way it affected close by house. This is what the spacecraft was constructed to do, Berghmans says.
The spacecraft’s focus is “connection science,” he says. Solar Orbiter’s devices detected the photo voltaic flare, the shock wave it created and the produced burst of charged particles and radio alerts — one after one other — over a number of hours. Previously, totally different telescopes would detect these individually over days.
By connecting the sequence of occasions into “a complete story,” Berghmans says, scientists can higher predict the outflows of these charged particles, that are particularly harmful to astronauts, satellites and even high-flying plane.
The spacecraft will cross near the solar roughly each 5 to 6 months by way of 2026. Then, for 3 extra years, the orbiter will swing nearer to the solar’s poles, offering scientists with their first head-on views of these areas.