There are many happy news that astronomers and scholars receive, and one of the most recent news is the news of the availability of the first images of the spectrometer project to the public, including the earliest images ever captured by the sun.
The Solar Orbiter is an international cooperation project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to study our closest star: the sun.
The spacecraft took off on February 9, and completed its first spacecraft near the sun in mid-June.
Unprecedented photos
Holly Gilbert, NASA scientist participating in the mission from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in a report published by Phys.org on July 17, says these unprecedented images of the sun are the closest ever.
"These amazing images will help scientists group the layers of the sun's atmosphere together, which is important to understand how this affects space weather near Earth and throughout the solar system," Gilbert added.
"We did not expect such great results at this very early time," says European Agency scientist and project participant Daniel Muller. "These images show that the solar spectrometer has made a great start."
The spectroscope had 6 photographic devices, each studying a different aspect of the sun. When the spacecraft flew within 48 million miles (more than 77 million km) from the sun, the spectroscope took the closest images of the sun to date.
The other spacecraft were closer to the spectrometer, but none of them carried sun-facing cameras.
Camp fire
Usually, the task of the first images of spacecraft is to confirm that the instruments are working successfully, and scientists do not expect new discoveries from them.
But the EU ultraviolet (EUI) imaging device on the solar spectrometer, provided data indicating solar features that had not been observed with such details before.
Astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, David Bergmans, refers to what he calls "campfires" spreading in "EUI" pictures.
"The campfires we are talking about here are the nieces of the solar flares, which are at least a million and perhaps a billion times smaller ... And when looking at the new high-resolution EUI images, these flames are literally everywhere we look," Bergmans says.
It is not yet clear what these campfires are or how they correspond to the solar brightness observed by other spacecraft.
But it is possible that they are small explosions known as nanoflares, which are theoretically small sparks that exist everywhere to help warm the outer atmosphere of the sun, or the aura, to a temperature 300 times more than the surface of the sun.
Coronal heating and zodiac light
To know for sure, scientists need a more accurate measurement of the camp fire temperature. Fortunately, the spectral imaging environment that the SPICE tool does on the spectrometer does just that.
"We are anxiously awaiting the following set of data to detect nanofellers with certainty and determine their role in coronal heating," says Friedrich Osher, lead researcher for Spice Operations at the Institute of Astrophysics in Orsay, France.
In addition, the SoloHI, led by Russell Howard from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, has revealed what is called a zodiacal light.
It is a solar light reflected from the dust between the planets, a light that is so dim that the bright face of the sun obscures it, and to see it Solahai had to reduce the sunlight to one trillion of its original brightness.
"The images produced a perfect light pattern of the zodiac, very clean ... which gives us a lot of confidence that we will be able to see the structures of the solar wind as we approach the sun," Howard says.
Magnetic field and space environment
PHI images have also shown that they are prepared for subsequent observations, as PHI designates the magnetic field of the sun, with a special focus on its columns.
It will have a peak later on in the mission when the solar spectrometer gradually tends its orbit to 24 degrees above the planetary level, giving it an unprecedented view of the sun's poles.
"The magnetic structures we see on the visible surface show that BHI is receiving high-quality data," said Sami Solanki, lead investigator for the BHI tool from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. As more sun poles emerge. "
Today's edition highlights the spectrometer's imaging devices, but the mission's four tools on site also revealed preliminary results. These instruments measure the space environment directly surrounding the spacecraft, and the SWA solar wind analyzer, the first measurements of heavy ions (carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, etc.) in the solar wind from the inner solarosphere.