Solar Orbiter's First Images Reveal "Campfires" on the Sun

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https://sci.esa.int/web/solar-orbiter/-/solar-orbiter-s-first-images-reveal-campfires-on-the-sun 

Source: By European Space Agency (ESA). 

Excerpt: The first images from Solar Orbiter, a new Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA, have revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires', near the surface of our closest star. ...Solar Orbiter, launched on 10 February 2020, carries six remote-sensing instruments... and four in situ instruments that monitor the environment around the spacecraft. By comparing the data from both sets of instruments, scientists will get insights into the generation of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the Sun that influences the entire Solar System. ...The campfires shown in the first image set were captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) from Solar Orbiter's first perihelion, the point in its elliptical orbit closest to the Sun. At that time, the spacecraft was only 77 million km away from the Sun, about half the distance between Earth and the star. "The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller," says David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), Principal Investigator of the EUI instrument.... "The Sun might look quiet at the first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look."... See also July 16 New York Times article: Closest Pictures Ever Taken of Sun Show Tiny Campfire Flares [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/solar-orbiter-sun-images.html]
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