This Is The Picture Taken At The Closest Distance Ever To The Sun

This year has seen a new breakthrough for NASA as its Parker Solar Probe successfully took pictures of our star at a nearer distance than any other space crafts had been able to do so far.

Attaining the speed of 213,200 miles, it was 15 million miles from the Sun’s surface, much closer than Mercury.

The Parker Solar Probe has broken two records in a row. The first one is being the fastest spacecraft ever and the other is the vessel that is able to get closest to the Sun.

Its achievement gives us the first glance of what the Sun’s surface looks like at this new record distance.

Nour Raouafi, the project scientist of Parker Solar Probe said that this mission had high chances of new discoveries.

The picture may seem hard to understand for untrained eyes, but NASA has shredded light on it. The white spot we see at the middle of the picture is Jupiter catching to the background. The main feature that most people notice is called coronal streamer.

Our Sun at the closest distance ever

Being the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona can be easily spotted when there is a total solar eclipse. The streamers happen when our star’s solar winds release more solar particles than they usually do.

The Parker Solar Probe has made a great effort to take such pictures. Giving that the Sun rotates every 27 days and due to its enormous size, the spacecraft had to gain a great speed to keep up.

The mission is not for taking pictures of the Sun’s surface alone. It has some big questions to find answers to. The first one is why the corona’s temperature is so much higher than the surface underneath it. The second one is what makes the solar winds gain speed so quickly. And last but not least, how some of the Sun’s particles can travel at the impressive pace of half the speed of light.

The Parker Solar Probe might find out the underlying principles of how the star at the heart of our solar system works.