Images of a gigantic solar flare revealed

Solar Orbiter, the joint solar mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), observed its first solar flare on February 15.

Of rare intensity, it was triggered while the craft was sailing on the other side of the sun, a chance, according to our colleagues from

 who relayed the information on Tuesday.

Indeed, such events could damage human technologies and prove dangerous for astronauts.

wow!

The giant solar eruption of 15 Feb seen by #SolarOrbiter – the largest solar prominence ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc, thanks to the novel design of our Full Sun Imager.

https://t.co/gtF6DLfkEy #ExploreFarther #WeAreAllSolarOrbiters pic.twitter.com/VS5jqRrcPU

— ESA's Solar Orbiter (@ESASolarOrbiter) February 18, 2022

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According to the scientists, this is the first time that an instrument, in this case the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) space telescope on board Solar Orbiter, has recorded a coronal mass ejection of this magnitude.

According to

, this frequent phenomenon results in the expulsion up to several hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space of billions of tons of ionized solar matter at speeds of the order of a thousand kilometers per second.

A phenomenon observed by other missions

The eruption, due to the bursting of a plasma bubble produced in the sun's corona, resulted in a coronal mass cloud that extended nearly 3.5 million kilometers.

A magnitude such that other missions have been able to observe the phenomenon.

This is the case, for example, of the Bepi Colombo mission (ESA, Jaxa) which set off to study Mercury.

Launched in February 2020, Solar Orbiter will not be fully operational until next November.

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NASA: A solar flare filmed in ultra high definition

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