The spaceship Solar Orbiter has captured images of a huge string of matter protruding from the solar surface.

They are officially called prominences: intertwined magnetic field lines that hold matter from the sun in a string or arc. And they can produce spectacular images.

What the new picture of the Solar Orbiter What makes it particularly special is that the prominences are in one picture with the solar surface. That’s thanks to the Full Sun Imager, an instrument onboard the probe that, as the name suggests, keeps the full sun in view. In addition, this camera observes a large part of the surroundings of the sun. Details can be seen up to 3.5 million kilometers away from the solar surface.

Other space telescopes also observe prominences. However, they either only look at areas closer to the sun’s surface, or they only see the surroundings of the sun. This makes the prominence in the picture according to the European Space Agency ESA “the largest ever recorded in a single field of view along with the solar disk”.

Solar Orbiter sees prominences

Shutdown Electricity Grids

Often, prominences are accompanied by eruptions in which the sun ejects billions of tons of matter into space; so-called coronal mass ejections† If such an eruption happens to be aimed at the Earth, the stream of charged particles that emanates from it could… have negative consequences for satellites and shut down electricity networks†

The Solar Orbiter, currently located between Earth and the Sun, has seen no such coronal mass ejection. “That means it must have originated on the part of the sun that faces away from us,” the ESA writes.

Quite a few charged particles

Incidentally, the Solar Orbiter is not the only unmanned spacecraft to have noticed something from this eruption. BepiColombo, on its way to Mercury, measured quite a few extra charged particles. But as far as is known, these have not caused any problems for the European planet explorer.