Just the Beginning :)

Solar Orbiter spots ‘campfires’ on the Sun. Locations of campfires are annotated with white arrows.

Credits: Solar Orbiter/EUI Team (ESA & NASA); CSL, IAS, MPS, PMOD/WRC, ROB, UCL/MSSL

This is just the beginning as this set of pictures is a system tune-up  for the onboard cameras.

Solar Orbiter carries six imaging instruments, each of which studies a different aspect of the Sun. Normally, the first images from a spacecraft confirm the instruments are working; scientists don’t expect new discoveries from them. But the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, on Solar Orbiter returned data hinting at solar features never observed in such detail.

Principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, points out what he calls “campfires” dotting the Sun in EUI’s images.

“The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” Berghmans said. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.”

This animation shows a sequence of images from the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) on ESA/NASA's Solar Orbiter. PHI measures the magnetic field near the Sun’s surface and allows the investigation of the Sun’s interior via the technique of helioseismology.

Credits: Solar Orbiter/ PHI Team/ESA & NASA

Again, science never disappoints. :)