Besides light, the Sun sends out particles in the form of solar wind and in large bursts called coronal mass ejections. Understanding how these streams and bursts of particles get pushed out from the Sun could help improve our forecasts of space weather reaching Earth.
Recently, the European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission demonstrated that it filled the ‘solar observation gap’. It can see movement to unprecedented detail in the hard-to-observe region between the Sun’s surface and higher up in its outer atmosphere (the corona). This makes it possible to closely track solar wind as it sets off from the inner corona.
This image is a still from a video. The (artificially coloured) yellow part of the video shows the Sun in ultraviolet light, recorded by the SWAP telescope on ESA’s Proba-2 spacecraft. The greyscale area around it is based on data captured in visible light by the ASPIICS coronagraph on Proba-3. This data is processed to enhance contrast.
In the video, you can see flows of solar wind moving away from the Sun in all directions. In some regions, particularly around the bottom of the video, you can see some material also falling back towards the Sun. In the second half of the video, a coronal mass ejection expands towards the right.
Read more