See the Sun in a Way You've Never Seen It Before, From Above and Below
Every image you've ever seen of the sun is looking at its equator, because Earth's orbit sits there with a 7.25-degree tilt. That means humans have never had a good angle to view the sun's north and south poles until now. The ESA has released images of the sun's north and south poles, giving everyone their first glimpse at the top and bottom of our nearest star.
The imagery was taken by the ESA's Solar Orbiter, which began its trek to view the sun's polar regions in 2020. To do this, the Orbiter engaged its boosters, made some adjustments and slingshotted itself around Venus at a staggering 27,000 MPH.
Once it reached its destination, it took images using its Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectra Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument.
"Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the sun's poles," said Professor Carole Mundell, ESA Director of Science, in a blog post. "The sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science."
See the Solar Orbiter's stunning sun view
The sun's poles.
ESA
The images are viewable above or in a YouTube video on ESA's channels. In the video, you can see the view that we Earthlings generally see before the video transitions to the solar orbiter's viewpoint and zooms in so you can see the bottom of the sun in all of its hot, fiery glory. The video is only 50 seconds, but it's 50 seconds of footage that humans have never seen before.
Most of the ESA's images and videos are of the sun's South Pole, but the blog post includes imagery of the North Pole as well. For the most part, scientists had no idea what to expect from the data, given that this is the first time any human had seen it before.
The full dataset from the Orbiter's first pole-to-pole adventure is set to reach Earth by October 2025, which will give scientists much more to work with in terms of understanding how the sun works. Future orbits will include measurements from all 10 of the Orbiter's tools, so even more information is coming over the next few years.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Macron says Europe must become 'space power' again
President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that Europe must again become a global space power, warning that France risked being squeezed out of the global low-orbit satellite constellation market. Macron spoke at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget outside the French capital a day after France more than doubled its stake in satellite operator Eutelsat, the EU rival to Elon Musk's Starlink. Macron called for more investment as the European space industry struggles to remain competitive in the face of US and Chinese rivals. "SpaceX has disrupted the market, Amazon is also getting involved. China is not far behind, and I think we all need to be very clear-headed," Macron said. Europe must become "a space power once again, with France at its heart", he said. He warned that Europeans were "on the verge of being completely" squeezed out of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation market. Orbiting just a few hundred kilometres above the Earth, low Earth orbit satellite networks can play a crucial role in various fields including telecommunications, emergency response, space exploration, and defence. Growing geopolitical tensions have forced countries to focus on the independence of their satellite infrastructure. Macron said France and its partners should not be reliant on non-European constellations in low orbit, calling it "madness". He called non-European players to team up with France. "This must be the solution for our major strategic partners in the Gulf, India, Canada and Brazil," he said. "We really need to succeed in increasing our collective investment effort," Macron added, noting the importance of private investors and public-private collaboration. He also said France planned to organise a space summit in early 2026 to "mobilise our public and private partners across the globe." As part of the overall deal with other investors worth 1.35 billion euros ($1.5 billion), the French state is set to become Eutelsat's largest shareholder. The European satellite operator is vying to be seen as an alternative to Starlink, as companies in Europe and elsewhere look askance at Musk's manoeuvrings and seek to secure sovereign solutions. Boasting more than 600 satellites since merging with British firm OneWeb in 2023, Eutelsat is the world's second-largest operator of low Earth orbit satellites, behind Starlink. fff-tq-as/ekf/js
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Earth's Magnetic Field Might Weirdly Be Controlling the Air We Breathe, Scientists Say
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Earth's oxygenated atmosphere and magnetic field make life possible, but scientists have discovered that there's a hidden link between the two that's stronger than we originally imagined. Comparing 540 million years of data from charcoal deposits and magnetic crystals formed from ancient volcanic eruptions, scientists found that the processes creating both increase at the same rate over time, and even experience the same jump in activity levels around 330 million years ago. Scientists aren't yet certain which mechanism is impacting the other—or if there is a third mechanism impacting them both. If you list all of the things that had to go right to make life on Earth possible, our minuscule existence (cosmically speaking) seems all the more amazing. Our Sun is a G-type star with moderate radiation output that doesn't tidally lock our planet. The Earth is situated in our Sun's habitable zone. The planet has maintained a robust atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years, and the dynamo at the planet's heart generates a magnetic field that protects us from the most harmful effects of space radiation. Earth truly is a paradise for life. Although scientists have known about these life-giving aspects of Earth for centuries, they're still discovering surprising connections between them. In a new study published last week in the journal Science Advances, scientists from NASA, the University of Washington, and the University of Leeds in the U.K. discovered a surprising connection between two of Earth's most important life-sustaining features—its oxygenated atmosphere and its magnetic field. It's hardly surprising that the existence of one of these features might impact the existence of the other. After all, Mars (which is also in the Sun's habitable zone) used to have an atmosphere, but without a robust magnetic field, the Red Planet eventually lost that atmosphere to the unrelenting lashing of solar winds. However, the authors of this new paper found that, on Earth, the correlation between these two systems runs much deeper than we previously imagined. 'We find that both exhibit strong linearly increasing trends, coupled with a large surge in magnitude between 330 and 220 million years ago,' the authors wrote. 'Our findings suggest unexpected strong connections between the geophysical processes in Earth's deep interior, the surface redox budget, and biogeochemical cycling.' Analyzing data stretching back to the Cambrian some 541 million years ago, the researchers found that the rise in Earth's magnetic field and the rise in its oxygen levels were very closely aligned—slowly increasing overtime, except for one bout of increased activity lasting from 330 million to 220 million years ago. To map this comparison over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the researchers couldn't rely on direct data—there is no such record for atmospheric oxygen levels, for example. However, they could track the strength of wildfires, which show up as charcoal deposits in the geologic record. This would provide a clue, since a stronger, longer-lasting fire means that there was more oxygen in the atmosphere to fuel said fire. To compare this record with Earth's magnetic field history, the team analyzed certain magnetic crystals that formed in ancient volcanoes and—due to their composition—essentially act like a 'compass frozen in time,' according to Nature. Once plotted side-by-side, the team noticed that the two processes largely increased in lockstep with one another, and even experienced the same increase 330 million years ago. Interestingly, this coincides with the formation of Pangea, though scientists aren't sure exactly if the formation of the supercontinent is related to the increase or a coincidence, as the data does stretch back far enough to compare levels to other supercontinents in Earth's history. So, what's going on here? Well, the researchers aren't exactly sure, but they have a few guesses. The most likely one is that Earth's magnetic field directly impacts oxygen levels, as it protects Earth (and oxygen-producing plants) from solar radiation. However, it's also possible that increased oxygenation coupled with plate tectonics—which drive oxygen toward the liquid outer core that produces the magnetic field—could also play a role. The authors also aren't ruling out the idea that a third, currently unknown mechanism could provide an explanation for this steadily upward trend. 'One single mind cannot comprehend the whole system of the Earth,' Ravi Kopparapu, a co-author of the study from NASA, told Live Science. 'We're like kids playing with Legos, with each of us having a separate Lego piece. We're trying to fit all of it together and see what's the big picture.' While 540 million years is an unfathomably long time compared to our human lifespan (or even our species' existence), it's only around 12 percent of Earth's entire existence, so these trends could simply be coincidental. All we can do is continue searching for answers among the clues that we do have, and try to grasp just how wondrous our home planet really is. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
A hunt for ghostly particles found strange signals coming from Antarctic ice. Scientists are still trying to explain them
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Scientists are trying to solve a decade-long mystery by determining the identity of anomalous signals detected from below ice in Antarctica. The strange radio waves emerged during a search for another unusual phenomenon: high-energy cosmic particles known as neutrinos. Arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos, neutrinos are often called 'ghostly' because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, and can go through any kind of matter without changing. Over the past decade, researchers have conducted multiple experiments using vast expanses of water and ice that are designed to search for neutrinos, which could shed light on mysterious cosmic rays, the most highly energetic particles in the universe. One of these projects was NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, experiment, which flew balloons carrying instruments above Antarctica between 2006 and 2016. It was during this hunt that ANITA picked up anomalous radio waves that didn't seem to be neutrinos. The signals came from below the horizon, suggesting they had passed through thousands of miles of rock before reaching the detector. But the radio waves should have been absorbed by the rock. The ANITA team believed these anomalous signals could not be explained by the current understanding of particle physics. Follow-up observations and analyses with other instruments, including one recently conducted by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have not been able to find the same signals. The results of the Pierre Auger Collaboration were published in the journal Physical Review Letters in March. The origin of the anomalous signals remains unclear, said study coauthor Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. 'Our new study indicates that such (signals) have not been seen by an experiment … like the Pierre Auger Observatory,' Wissel said. 'So, it does not indicate that there is new physics, but rather more information to add to the story.' Larger, more sensitive detectors may be able to solve the mystery, or ultimately prove whether the anomalous signals were a fluke, while continuing the search for enigmatic neutrinos and their sources, scientists say. Detecting neutrinos on Earth allows researchers to trace them back to their sources, which scientists believe are primarily cosmic rays that strike our planet's atmosphere. The most highly energetic particles in the universe, cosmic rays are made up mostly of protons or atomic nuclei, and they are unleashed across the universe because whatever produces them is such a powerful particle accelerator that it dwarfs the capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider. Neutrinos could help astronomers better understand cosmic rays and what launches them across the cosmos. But neutrinos are difficult to find because they have almost no mass and can pass through the most extreme environments, like stars and entire galaxies, unchanged. They do, however, interact with water and ice. ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The experiment's radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said. During its flights, ANITA found high-energy fountains of particles coming from the ice, a kind of upside-down shower of cosmic rays. The detector is also sensitive to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays that rain down on Earth and create a radio burst that acts like a flashlight beam of radio waves. When ANITA watches a cosmic ray, the flashlight beam is really a burst of radio waves one-billionth of a second long that can be mapped like a wave to show how it reflects off the ice. Twice in their data from ANITA flights, the experiment's original team spotted signals coming up through the ice at a much sharper angle than ever predicted by any models, making it impossible to trace the signals to their original sources. 'The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' Wissel said. Neutrinos can travel through a lot of matter, but not all the way through the Earth, Vandenbroucke said. 'They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,' he wrote in an email. 'The ANITA anomalous events are intriguing because they appear to come from well below the horizon, so the neutrinos would have to travel through much of the Earth. This is not possible according to the Standard Model of particle physics.' The Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists around the world, analyzed more than a decade's worth of data to try to understand the anomalous signals detected by ANITA. The team also used their observatory to try to find the same signals. The Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector that uses two methods to find and study cosmic rays. One method relies on finding high-energy particles as they interact with water in tanks on Earth's surface, and the other tracks potential interactions with ultraviolet light high in our planet's atmosphere. 'The Auger Observatory uses a very different technique to observe ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers, using the secondary glow of charged particles as they traverse the atmosphere to determine the direction of the cosmic ray that initiated it,' said Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. 'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'
