The Solar Orbiter mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) has just taken images of the Sun that reveal it in unprecedented detail. SciTechDaily news platform reports today that: “The images were taken when the Solar Orbiter was at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometers [45 million miles], halfway between our world and its parent star. The high-resolution telescope of Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) takes pictures of such high spatial resolution that, at that close distance, a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes, including the time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next.”
One of the images taken by the EUI is the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.
Another image was taken in the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas. (The Lyman series is a series of lines in the hydrogen spectrum associated with transitions to or from the first energy level or ground state.)
