It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the surface of the Sun would be extraordinarily hellish in its dynamics, but it’s still incredible to visually behold.
In case you missed it, the European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a video that gives an unprecedented new close-in look at just that. It sharply reveals just what kind of gargantuan turmoil churns over the surface of our star.
The ESA’s Solar Orbiter probe captured the footage in 2023 right from nearly as close as it’s possible to record from without onboard camera failure.
The color video reveals the panorama of an incomprehensibly vast hellscape of superheated plasma and exploding particle ejections whose size is difficult to put into perspective.
Throughout the video, the ESA interjects with explanatory names for different elements of what you’re looking at.
These luminous structures include torrents of energized particles blasting out of the Sun’s lower atmosphere as “coronal rain” and plasma “micro-eruptions” that shoot forth from the surface of the star. Smallest of all are the many scattered filaments of what’s called “coronal moss emerging from all over the surface”
Throughout the video, it’s always worth keeping in mind the sheer scale of what you’re observing. It truly is hard to comprehend on anything resembling a terrestrial scale.
Early in the video, a series of small flaring structures is shown and though tiny in the context of their surrounding scenery, they’re each easily 6,000 or more miles (11,000+ km) tall. At another point 22 seconds into the video, there’s a very small coronal eruption from the sun’s plasma surface. This alone is multiple times the size of the whole earth.
It’s also worth remembering that much larger coronal ejections are extremely common and can stretch out for hundreds of times the diameter of the Earth above the solar surface.
They’re also responsible for events such as the recent solar storm that gave us the aurora borealis at extraordinarily low latitudes.
Aching far above everything else in the video are vast, almost delicate-looking bands of what’s called coronal rain, dwarfing all the other shifting surface features visible on the sun.
The temperatures within this immense, hellishly beautiful panorama range from about 10,000 degrees Celsius to over 1 million degrees.
The Solar Orbiter caught this remarkable sequence of direct visuals during a close-in descent towards the Sun on September 27 2023 and used its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) to capture its recording.
Even at this close distance, the space probe was still removed from the solar surface by roughly a third of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Along with the video it captured, the Orbiter also took time to measure the nature of the solar wind coming off our star.
This same solar wind had already passed the much closer Parker Solar Probe (PSP) sent by NASA, and the dual sets of observations from each probe let ESA and NASA scientists compare notes for a better understanding of their data.
The Parker Solar Probe, the Solar Orbiter’s partner in exploring the Sun
If you’re wondering why the Parker Solar Probe didn’t also capture photos or video of the solar surface from its much nearer position, it’s because the NASA probe is too close.
At its current distance from the sun, it’s pretty much touching the star’s outer surface and at that close a range, no camera in existence could withstand being used the film the surface.
Thus, the Solar Orbiter conducts visual contextual observations while the PSP samples the Sun’s corona with its own onboard instruments.
