Awesome solar energy

The awesome energy of the Sun can be readily appreciated in this sequence of images combining data from three instruments on the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft. It shows the way a solar flare on 25 March 2022, one day before Solar Orbiter’s closest approach to the Sun, created a huge disturbance in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar corona, leading to a huge quantity of the gas being hurled into space in a coronal mass ejection.

The first image was taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument at a wavelength of 17 nanometres. The solar flare is shown by an arrow. The view then zooms out to show what the Metis instrument sees. Metis takes pictures of the corona from 1.7 to 3 solar radii by blotting out the Sun’s bright disc. The final zoom shows the huge coronal mass ejection blasting into space. The data comes from SoloHI, which records images made of sunlight scattered by the electrons in the solar wind.