By Will Dunham
(Reuters) -The robotic solar orbit spacecraft obtained the first images that were ever taken from the column of our sun, as scientists seek a deeper understanding of the host star, including its magnetic field, its 11 -year activity cycle and solar wind.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency released photos taken in March using three tools on the solar plane. They appear the southern pole of the sun from a distance of about 40 million miles (65 million km), obtained in a period of maximum solar activity. Arctic images are still transmitted by the spacecraft to Earth.
Solar Orbiter, developed by ESA in cooperation with NASA in 2020 from Florida.
To date, all the sun’s views have come from the same point – looking face to the equator from the plane that orbits the Earth and most of the other planets in the solar system, which is called the eclipse.
Orbiter Solar Al -ALingshot Flyby was used around Venus in February to get out of this plane to watch the sun from up to 17 degrees below the solar equator. The future Flybys Flybys will provide a better vision, in more than 30 degrees.
“It is still the best of the best. What we have seen is just a quick look,” said Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for the Solar System Research in Germany, which heads the scientific team for space paths and helios’ perceptions.
Solanki said: “The spacecraft noticed both the two poles, first the Antarctic, then the Arctic.” “The Arctic data will arrive in the coming weeks or months.”
The solar orbit collects data on the phenomena including the magnetic field of the sun, its activity cycle, solar wind, and a high -speed flow is not relentless in the charged particles emitted from the layer of the outer atmosphere of the sun that fill the space between the planets.
“We are not only what we will find, and it is likely we will see those we didn’t know about before,” said so the physicist hamish Reid of University College London’s Multlar Space Science Laboratory, UK CO-PRINCIPAL Investigator of Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager Instrument.
The sun is an electric -charged gas ball, with its move, generating a strong magnetic field, turning from south to north and back again every 11 years in the so -called solar cycle.
The magnetic field pushes the formation of solar spots, and the cooler areas on the surface of solar energy that appear as dark acts. At the beginning of the cycle, the sun contains fewer solar spots. Their number increases with the progress of the course, before starting again.
“What we lost to understand this (solar cycle) is what is already happening at the top and bottom of the sun,” said Reed.
The sun diameter is about 865,000 miles (1.4 million km), more than 100 times wider than Earth.
“While the Earth has a north and southern pistachinical, the solar orbit measurements show both magnetic fields in the north and south, currently present in the southern pole of the sun. This occurs during the maximum solar cycle activity, when the magnetic field in the sun is about to reduce the sun.
“We see in the images and films in the polar areas that the magnetic field of the sun is messy in the columns in the current stage of the solar cycle – high solar activity, the maximum session,” Solanki said.
The sun is located about 93 million miles (149 million km) from our planet.
“The data that the solar orbit gets during the coming years will help designers predict the solar cycle. This is important for us on Earth because sun activity causes solar torches and ejaculate the coronary mass that can lead to power outages of radio communications, and to destabilize our strength networks, but it also provokes exciting Auroras.”
“The new point of Solar Orbiter will also give us the point outside the eclipse, also get a better picture of how the solar wind expands to form hellaraviri, which is a vast bubble about the sun and its planets.”
A previous spacecraft, icolis, flew over the solar columns in the 1990s.
“Ulysses was blind, meaning that he did not carry any visual tools – telescopes or cameras – and therefore you can only feel the solar winds that pass the spacecraft directly, but it could not photograph the sun,” Solanki said.
(Will Dunaham’s reports in Washington, edited by Rozlabba O’Brien) participated in the reports of Will Dun.
