This animation shows five views of the Sun captured with the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instruments on ESA’s Solar Orbiter.
The first two views were taken with EUI’s Full Sun Imager (FSI) taken across the week following 30 May 2020. The yellow image shows the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, which exists at a temperature of around one million degrees. The red image shows the Sun’s transition region, which is an interface between the lower and upper layers of the solar atmosphere. In this region, which is only about 100 km thick, the temperature increases by a factor of up to 100 to reach the one million degrees of the corona.
The third, fourth and fifth views are based on data taken with PHI on 18 June 2020.
The third view is a ‘tachogram’ of the Sun, showing the line of sight velocity of the Sun, with the blue side turning to us and the red side turning away. The fourth view is a magnetogram, or a map of magnetic propertied for the whole Sun, featuring a large magnetically active region in the lower right-hand quadrant of the Sun. The fifth view is a visible light image and represents what we would see with the naked eye. There are no sunspots visible because the Sun is displaying only low levels of magnetic activity at the moment.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA.