Solar flare rises from the limb
A solar flare on 21 March occurred just behind the visible face of the Sun as seen by the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Nevertheless, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the X-ray Spectrometer/Telescope (STIX) instruments aboard the spacecraft both recorded the event as it rose above the Sun’s limb.
This animated gif begins at 05:10 UT on 21 March 2022. EUI records the extreme ultraviolet light emitted by gas in the Sun’s atmosphere with a temperature of around one million degrees. To create the pictures seen here, known as difference images, pairs of successive images are subtracted from each other. This process reveals faint, transient phenomena.
A clear disturbance is taking place in the atmosphere by 05:20 UT. Ten minutes later, STIX begins to see X-rays (shown in red) from the growing flare as the eruption blooms outwards. By 05:40, a small component of higher energy X-rays (shown in blue) is also detected. For the next twenty minutes, STIX continues to record X-rays as EUI charts the disturbance through the solar atmosphere.
