This morning, the European Space Agency and NASA have unveiled the closest images of the Sun ever taken by a spacecraft: high-resolution pictures taken by their newly launched Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Already, the pictures are revealing weird phenomena on the Sun that we’ve never seen in such detail.
“We didn’t really expect the first images to turn out really this great,” Daniel Müller, ESA’s project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission, tells The Verge. “They’re not only really sharp and perfectly exposed from the technical perspective, but they really show things that we have not seen before.”
Thanks to these images, scientists have discovered what appear to be relatively “tiny” solar flares peppered across the Sun’s surface. The scientists behind the mission have dubbed these small flares “campfires,” as they are millions to billions of times smaller than the massive, energetic flares that periodically erupt from the Sun. Dozens of these campfires can be seen at any give time within the field of view of Solar Orbiter’s camera. “What is intriguing is that they seem to be happening everywhere on the Sun all the time,” says Müller.
