Closest Pictures Ever Taken of Sun Show Tiny Campfire Flares

Images of the new phenomenon were captured by Solar Orbiter, a joint European-NASA mission to study the sun.

The first images from a new solar mission — the closest ever taken of the sun — reveal a ubiquitous burbling of miniature solar flares. The discovery may provide clues for how turbulence heats the atmosphere of the sun and drives the ebb and flow of solar wind, the high-velocity charged particles throughout the solar system that buffet Earth and the other planets.

“We’ve never been closer to the sun with a camera,” Daniel Müller, the project scientist for the mission, Solar Orbiter, said during a news conference held on Thursday by the European Space Agency. “And this is just the beginning of the long epic journey of Solar Orbiter.”

The miniature solar flares, which the scientists call campfires, were seen as the spacecraft made its first close approach to the sun. It came within 48 million miles of the sun’s surface, which is just a bit more than half of the distance between Earth and the sun.

The campfires are about one-millionth or one-billionth the size of flares that have been observed from Earth. The sun is currently in the quiet part of its 11-year-solar cycle, and the surface looks placid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/solar-orbiter-sun-images.html