ESA’s Solar Orbiter may have taken another step towards solving the eighty-year-old mystery of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so hot. On March 3, 2022, just a few months into Solar Orbiter’s nominal mission, the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returned data showing for the first
ESA’s Sun-explorer Solar Orbiter is an advanced scientific lab that aims to uncover the mysteries of the Sun’s behavior by capturing close-up images and examining its unexplored polar regions. Researchers are analyzing data from various instruments to address questions about the Sun’s magnetic activity cycle, coronal heating, solar wind generation, and its effects on Earth. Credit: ESA/Medialab
At that time, the spacecraft was about halfway between the Earth and the Sun. This enabled coordinated observations with’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph missions. The data from the three missions was then combined during the analysis. In the past, magnetic reconnection has usually been seen during large-scale, explosive phenomena. However, the new result presents ultra-high-resolution observations of persistent small-scale reconnection in the corona. These are revealed to be a long-lived ‘gentle’ sequence compared to sudden explosive releases of energy that reconnection is usually associated with.
ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission faces the Sun from within the orbit of Mercury at its closest approach. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
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