![]() ways, allowing it to trace the field from the Sun’s surface out into space. The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft investigates the Sun’s magnetic field in a number of different. “Even if Solar Obiter stopped taking data tomorrow, I would be busy for years trying to figure all this stuff out.” “The images are really breathtaking,” says David Berghmans at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the EUI. This region is mysteriously hotter than the surface of the Sun and it’s also where most of the solar activity that drives space weather takes place. The image comes from Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, which takes high-resolution images of the Sun’s corona. About 15,500 miles/25,000 kilometers long, this “solar hedgehog” is twice the diameter of the Earth and has spikes of hot and cooler gas spraying in all directions. This image, above ( and video), is what the Solar Orbiter scientists are calling a “solar hedgehog.” You can see why by looking at the bottom of the image, though scientists aren’t sure what’s going on. The image was captured on 30 March 2022 by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team The ‘Solar Hedgehog’ mystery At present no one knows exactly what it is or how it formed in the Sun’s atmosphere. The intriguing feature in the bottom third of the image, below the centre, has been nicknamed the. The Sun’s solar maximum is predicted to occur during 2025, so Solar Orbiter will have a ringside seat to watch it peak and trough. It’s hoped that this part of the mission will solve the mystery of why the Sun appears to have a roughly 11 year cycle during which it waxes to “solar maximum” and wanes to “solar minimum.” It will repeat that manoeuvre in December 2025, which will further incline its orbit-and so will being its “high-latitude” mission during which we’ll see many extraordinary top-down images of our star’s polar regions. In February 2025 the spacecraft will flyby Venus, getting a gravity assist to fling it into an inclined orbit of the Sun. There’s much more to come of the Sun’s polar regions. Our star’s magnetic fields get swept up to the poles before being swallowed back down into the Sun. The poles are mysterious parts of the Sun that are thought to seed solar activity. It shows lighter areas created by loops of magnetism and darker areas where the Sun’s magnetic field lies open and where gasses escape to form the solar wind. ![]() ![]() The main image at the top of this article (and the video above) is of the Sun’s south pole. ![]()
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