Spacecraft Takes Close Up Video of the Sun, Revealing Otherworldly Hellscape
The European Space Agency has released an incredible video of the Sun's roiling surface, taken by its Solar Orbiter last year from a front-row vantage point.
The dynamic video shows strands of energized particles leaving the star's lower atmosphere in the form of "coronal rain," with small eruptions of plasma dotting a fuzzy, "coronal moss" surface — a hellish perspective that required the daring orbiter to swoop by at an extremely close distance.
During its September 27 descent, the Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) recorded the Sun's surface from a distance of roughly a third of the distance between the Earth and the Sun (which is just over 100 times the diameter of our planet and therefore appears much larger).
The Orbiter used the opportunity to measure the solar winds emanating from the Sun, which would flow past NASA's Parker Solar Probe shortly after, allowing scientists at the two agencies to compare notes.
