NEW DELHI: A new close-up video captured by the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter shows what the Sun’s surface looks like. The video shared shows a detailed version of the Sun’s surface, transitioning from the star’s lower atmosphere to its corona which often burps out billions of tons of coronal material.

In the video, you see a bright ray of light which looks similar to when a light ray shines through trees in a forest. These rays or hair-like structures are made from plasma and are basically magnetic field lines emerging from the star’s interior. These gas rays, known as spicules, can be as big as 6,214 miles or almost 10,000 km from the Sun’s chromosphere.

According to the European Space Agency, the brightest spots in the video can reach up to one million degrees Celsius whereas the dark spots indicate the regions where radiation gets absorbed.

In the lower-left corner of the video, you see some patterns caused by bright gas which the agency calls coronal ‘moss’, which are often found near large coronal loops that are currently invisible to the solar probe.

At the 22-second mark, you can also see a small eruption taking place in the center. While these eruptions do look small in the video, the European Space Agency says they are bigger than the Earth and show how cooler material is lifted upwards and eventually falls back down due to the Sun’s massive gravitational force.

The video captured by the solar probe is at one third of the total distance between the Sun and Earth, with the space agency planning to bring it even closer to the star.

Agencies

Agencies