View the first images of Sun’s South Pole
Solar orbiter not the first spacecraft to study the posts of the day – but it’s the first sender pictures
A map of the shine from the instrument of Slanar orbiter appears in the location of carbon ions in the day’s gentle region where the temperature rises suddenly.
We are the earthly saw the sun every day of our life – but claim A true new view of our star some Rarely and valuable thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists get a picture of one of the bad posts of the day.
Images come to courtesy of a spacecraft called Orbiter Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched on February 2020 and began our star November 2021. But the mission is now beginning its most interesting work: Study the posts of the day.
From land and spacecraft are equal, Let’s look at the sun is biased. “We have a great look at the center of the day,” says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and a project scientist for the mission. “But the sticks are effectively invisible because we always find them almost exactly the content.”
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We started taking a better sight earlier this year, if the orbiter went through the previous Venus in a careful involvement of solar orbits of the planets and the equator of the sun. .
Leaving ecliptics is an expensive, expensive manipulation of fuel for spacecraft, but where the solar orbiter, the spacecraft orbit will face ecliptic. That tolerance orbit is allowing solar orbiting for no lasting views of the posts of the day.
Many of the sun views as Solar Orbiter saw March 2025. The three larger views appear on the day of visible light, and show the sun in ultraviolet light. Small views show light from hired gas in the day at different temperatures.
For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles are not geographical poles; They are magnetic poles-in breeds. The sun is a large plasma swirl that Makes immediately eliminating a magnetic field. This is driving 11 years of solar activity cycle.
In the minimum solar, the lowest activity of the cycle, the magnetic field is called by scientists a giant magnet, with a strong pole at each end. But while the sun is running, roiling plasma creates Sunspots, dark, pretty cool patches on the face of the day that withdrawal of tangles in magnetic lines. While sunspots emerged and disappeared, these tangles could not be blocked, and some of the absence of magnetic mnetic mignetes to the nearest pole, which it offset the polar magnetic. The result is a unique transition status, with the day posts covered by a patchwork at the localized “North” and “South” magnetic polarities.
To the maximum solar stage (that the sun is now in), the magnetic field of each pole is effectively lost. (It can be a flexible process for a period of time a waste of charge before a waste it is a waste of an increase.
These are not things in academic curiosity; The activity of the day affects our daily life. Solar swells like Radiation flares And the masses of coronal charged plasma can travel to the solar system to reach our neighborhood, and they change the day that changes our stars in the first mountains. In the world these emissions can destroy power grids and radio systems; In orbit they can interfere with communications and satellites to navigations and can damage astronauts.
So scientists want to predict this so-called space of time, as they do in the terrestrial period. But to do this, they should understand how sunset – hard to do with bad view of magnetic activity in and around the poles of our star. That’s where the solar orbiter enters.
Most spacecraft observations do not come to earth to this autumn. But ESA released the first view from three different instruments aboard the solar orbiter, each who allows scientists to find different oddities.
Solar Orbiter’s view of magnetic fields around the South Pole of the Sun Pole. Patches in blue and red marks the mixture magnetic field in this region indicating the maximum solar.
For example, the image above map the magnetic field on the face of the sun. And from this view, Müller said, obviously the sun was at the longest time of its activity cycle. Heliophysical models predicting “a more distinct patches of North and South Polarity all over the place,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we see.”
As the theoretical models are written, Solar poles are not completely mysterious places. That’s about because while Solar Orbiter was the first to sow polar images, this was not the first spacecraft to fly in these regions. That title is owned by Ulysses, a joint mission of NASA launched in 1990 and operated until 2009.
Ulyses carry a host to instruments designed to study radiation particles, magnetic fields, and more. And it is used to them to make many suspicious discoveries about our stars and in spilled poles. But do not carry cameras, so despite all these insights, Ulyssses left the regions that appear to be invisible.
Fortunately, heliophysics have been so many days – and learned with space agencies, in the public eye, a picture can be worth more than 1,000 words. The result: The solar orbiter can finally place the content of the posts of the day.
