Solar Orbiter spacecraft has captured the sharpest pictures of the Sun so far. Photo

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which was launched in 2020 as part of a joint ESA and NASA mission, has captured the sharpest images of the Sun's surface yet. The highest resolution photos show our hot star from another angle.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared four new images taken by the spacecraft last March, when the probe was about 74 million kilometers from the Sun. The images show in detail the dynamic and grainy surface of the star, known as the photosphere, the layer that emits the sunlight that people see, Space.com reports.

One of the six instruments aboard Solar Orbiter, the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), has captured images of granules on the Sun's surface, which are large turbulent cells of plasma, each covering about 1,000 kilometers, scientists say.

The spacecraft also captured an image with a new map of the Sun's magnetic fields. According to scientists, it shows that the magnetic fields are particularly strong and concentrated in sunspot areas.

"The sun's magnetic field is key to understanding the dynamic nature of our home star from the smallest to the largest scales," said Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist for Solar Orbiter.

Another new map, called a tachogram, shows the speed and direction in which material is moving on the Sun's surface, experts explain. In the image, the blue areas are moving toward the Solar Orbiter, while the red areas are moving away, indicating the Sun's rotation on its axis.

According to ESA, Solar Orbiter is now about 120 million kilometers away from the Sun, just beyond the orbit of Venus. The spacecraft, in cooperation with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, recently offered new clues to the long-standing mystery of how the solar wind heats up and accelerates to incredible speeds in space.

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