Thanks to the rapid work of researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA), we now know that the North Pole of the Sun looks like.
The poles of the earth are no longer rude and mysterious, but the poles of the sun are another thing altogether. The only satellite assignment to fly over the solar coils Ulysses in the mid 90’s had no image management tools.
The newly formed image, which ESA shared on Monday, is just an approximation of the Sun’s North Pole, but it’s no less fascinating than the real thing. Due to the lack of image data from the solar poles (most satellite missions focus on observing lower latitudes), researchers have created artificial images by extrapolating from image data collected by the Proba-2 satellite. It’s a careful process, and the striking image shared on Monday is the result of many months of hard work and dozens of iterations. Here is a larger picture:
Image: ESA / Royal Observatory in Belgium
Knowledge of solar poles is crucial for investigating several open areas of study with regard to the sun, such as coronary holes, areas of the plasma-based aura surrounds the sun, which is colder, darker and has less density than the rest of the corona.
ESA’s artificial images of the sun’s poles will continue to improve, but we must wait for the launch of the ESA 2020 Solar Orbiter mission to get a first-hand view of Sun’s geographic extremes.
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