Once you get too close to it, the Sun is nothing like we usually perceive it in our everyday lives. This is now being confirmed by the new observations of the Solar Orbiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Parker Solar Probe of NASA.
The Solar Orbiter has taken footage of the Sun up-close as our star showcases its lower atmosphere and hotter outer corona, as SciTechDaily reveals. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) of the Solar Probe is the tool responsible for the new footage, to be more precise. We can observe the charged gas known as plasma.
Over one million degrees
You might have guessed by now that the Sun is extremely hot, as otherwise, how would it be able to give us energy and light from 150 million kilometers away? The brightest regions of our star even reach temperatures of about one million degrees Celsius.
If you’re wondering just exactly how close was the Solar Orbiteer to the Sun in order to record the footage, the answer is simple: about a third of the distance that separates our planet from the Sun. That’s 43 million kilometers.
You might have also guessed that our star, which is considered a yellow dwarf, is huge. The circumference at the equator is 4,379,000 kilometers. The radius measures almost 700,000 kilometers. The Sun also orbits around the center of the Milky Way galaxy with 200km per second, which also means 720,000km per hour.
There are 8 recognized planets revolving around the Sun, including our beloved Earth. Although some voices claim that Pluto should also be considered a planet, the dwarf planet lost that status in 2006 when the definition of the word “planet” was modified.