Solar Orbiter imaging spectrographer, Spice, took this unprecedented image of the South Pole of the Sun. It is a brightness map that shows excited carbon or ions atoms, within a thin transition region of the sun in which the temperature increases quickly and dramatically. Credit: Esa & Nasa/Solar Orbiter/Spice Team, M. Janvier (ESA) and J. Plowman (Swri)
Launched in February 2020, the solar probe of the solar orbit of the European Space Agency (ESA) was around the sun with a special purpose in mind: studying the poles of our star.
The planets orbit the sun in a single plane, called ecliptic. This means that we are approximately with the sun equator and we do not see its poles from the earth the mission of the sun orbit, however, it has been designed thinking of an inclined orbit, allowing the spaceship to see what on earth cannot, allowing us to study the entire sun.
But the path of Solar Orbiter has not started. It is thanks to Venus, which provides assistance of periodic gravity while the spatial orbits resonating with the planet, that the solar orbit has been able to pump its inclination, reaching a 17th inclination compared to the sun equator following its last Flyby of Venus in February of this year.
And today, ESA released the first images and videos to show the poles of the sun, imaging from a latitude of 17th to the south to the sun. They bring the entire south pole of our star for the first time.
The crown
The instantaneous above is from the observations taken on March 23 from the Ultraviolet Imager (Eui) Mission. It shows the overheated gas of the sun crown, or more external atmosphere, which reaches millions of degrees. Exactly as the crown reaches such high temperatures, a mystery remains that researchers hope that missions such as solar orbiter will unlock.
As the name suggests, Eui sees the sun in the ultraviolet light, which is more energetic of the light that our eyes see. Visible are plumes and arches of the hot plasma inside the crown, whose shape and behavior are governed by the solar magnetic field.
Fluent material
This speed map, produced by the ghostly imaging of the imaging spectrograde of the coronal environment (Spice), shows how the super hot excited carbon atoms (called ions) are moving in the South Poor of the Sun. Here, the blue colors show material that moves towards the space vehicle (outdoors from the sun), while red is material that falls towards the sun. The darker shades represent faster speeds, with faster movements associated with plumes or jets of material.
The map shows carbon within the so -called sun transition region, in which the temperatures in the atmosphere of our star shoot tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of degrees. This region separates the internal and external atmosphere of the sun – in the upper part is where the overheated crown begins.
A magnetic casino
If you are thinking that the pole of the sun so far resembles the rest of our star – that’s where things change. Our sun is a magnetic machine, with its strong magnetic field that guides its behavior. That magnetic field guides the solar wind in constant evolution of the charged particles that flow throughout the sun system. Also called how and when sunscreen, prominences and enormous materials of material occur that create larger space weather events.
And the sun orbit, with its highly inclined orbit, is seeing more details on the magnetic field of the sun than ever.
At this moment, the sun is in a special moment in its 11 -year -old cycle, having reached the maximum sun at the end of last year. This is a period of greater activity (as we have seen from abundant and vast scope aurorae in the last year) while the poles of our star prepare to turn the polarity upside down, which means that its magnetic poles in the north and south will exchange places.
Get a view of the poles Now Is will show us what’s going on there while this change begins. The behavior of the Ebbing material and flowing is a proxy for the behavior of the magnetic field there, while the view of the sun overall allows us to better see the border between its northern and southern magnetic regions, which will change as the switch begins.
According to the ESA version, the first look of Solar Orbiter revealed that the magnetic field in the South Pole of the Sun “is currently a disaster”. This image, taken by the Polarimetric and Eliosei -Isic (Phi) IMER, shows the polarity (or direction) of the solar magnetic field in the South Poor of the Sun. The blue indicates a positive magnetic field that focuses towards the outside, while the red indicates a negative magnetic field that focuses inwards.
Rather than having an individual overwhelming polarity, as in normal conditions, Phi has revealed that instead the South Pole of the Sun is flooded in magnetic fields both positive and negative, a short -lived phenomenon that occurs only around the maximum sun. Within the next few years, once the poles turn completely, the North and South Pole should be satisfied with a single magnetic polarity once again.
Unknown land no more
“We did not know what to expect exactly from these first observations: the Poles of the sun are literally unknown land,” said Team Phi Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, in the press release.
And these first images are only the tip of the iceberg. The complete data set containing our first opinions of both solar poles, which will include observations of all 10 tools of the space vehicle, will not arrive in the hands of scientists until October.
This is also only the beginning: the sun orbit will continue to raise the inclination of its increasingly higher orbit in the coming years, imaging in the end imaging the sun from a latitude of 33 ° by the end of the decade. His next “Bump” will take him from an inclination from 17 ° to 24 °, when he flies to Venus on Christmas Eve next year and uses the severity of the planet again to regulate his orbit.
“The sun is our closest star, life donor and potential disregarder of modern energy and land systems on the ground, therefore it is essential to understand how it works and we learn to predict their behavior,” said Carole Mundell, director of ESA science. “These new unique views from our mission of solar orbiter are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”
Related: What will Solar Orbiter’s mission realize?
