A team of scientists compared data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter and discovered that magnetic waves known as Alfvén waves, essentially a form of plasma wave, are responsible for pumping energy into the solar wind, causing it to accelerate and heat up as it travels away from the Sun.
A major solar flare measuring X14 erupted on the Sun’s far side at 00:00 UTC on July 23, 2024, producing a full halo coronal mass ejection (CME). The event sent energetic particles throughout the solar system, including Earth, where it caused an S1 – Minor solar radiation storm.
The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc. This latest event took place on February 15, 20221 on the far side of the Sun and extended millions of…
A new Sun-observing mission led by ESA and NASA — Solar Orbiter — has returned its first images of the Sun, revealing previously unknown omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires.' The campfires shown in the image below were captured by the…
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passed through the ion tail of Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) on May 31 and June 1, 2020, and through its dust tail on June 6. This is the 7th space mission to fly through the tail of a comet, and the first one whose upcoming crossing was…
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its Solar Orbiter probe will have a rare encounter with the Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), passing through the object's ion tail on May 31, 2020 into June 1. Solar Orbiter’s upcoming crossing is the first to be…
20 years after inception, 6 years of construction and more than a year of testing, ESA's new Sun-exploring spacecraft was successfully launched by the US Atlas V 411 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 04:04 UTC on…
Solar Orbiter — a joint NASA/ESA mission will launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral at 04:30 UTC on February 6 (23:30 EST, February 5). The spacecraft will provide the first views of the Sun's unexplored polar regions from high-latitudes, giving…
