Solar Orbiter sees ‘campfires’ on the Sun

The first images from ESA’s Solar Orbiter, captured around the spacecraft’s first close pass of the Sun, some 77 million kilometres from its surface, are already exceeding expectations revealing interesting new phenomena on our parent star. This animation shows a series of close-up views captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) at wavelengths of 17 nanometers, showing the upper atmosphere of the Sun, or corona, with a temperature of around 1 million degrees. These images reveal a multitude of sm