A telescope on the Solar Orbiter satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) has created an image of the Sun with the best quality ever recorded to date.  On March 7^th, when it captured the image released by the ESA at the end of that month, it was 75 million kilometers away from the star. In the photo, you can see the entire Sun and its corona (the outer atmosphere of the star).

Named Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, the Solar Orbiter telescope produces images in such high resolution that 25 photos taken individually were needed to assemble a mosaic depicting a single image of the Sun.

The process to compile the single image, with photos taken separately, lasted close to four hours. The final picture has over 83 million pixels – an image whose quality is ten times better than that, of a 4K television screen.

Atmosphere layers

Other images that show different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere have also been released by the ESA. The colors correspond to the elements in the star and the temperature on its atmosphere:

• Purple corresponds to hydrogen gas at 10,000 degrees Celsius

• Blue to carbon at 32 thousand degrees Celsius

• Green to oxygen at 320,000 degrees Celsius

• Yellow to neon at 630,000 degrees Celsius

The new records will help scientists understand, for instance, why the star’s temperature continues to increase in some of the layers of its atmosphere.

Sources: CNN Brasil, ESA, Folha de S.Paulo, and G1

Questions

1) How many photos were collected to assemble the image of the Sun?
a) 25.
b) 75.
c) 84.
d) 4.

2) Are you interested in news about the solar system? Why?

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