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Astronomers Watch Delayed Broadcast of a Powerful Stellar Eruption
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:00:43 Aside from sunlight, the Sun sends out a gusty stream of particles called the solar wind. The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission is the first to capture on camera this wind flying out from the Sun in a twisting, whirling motion. The solar wind particles spiral outwards as if caught in a cyclone that extends millions of kilometres from the Sun.
Solar wind rains down on Earth's atmosphere constantly, but the intensity of this rain depends on solar activity. More than just a space phenomenon, solar wind can disrupt our telecommunication and navigation systems.
Solar Orbiter is on a mission to uncover the origin of the solar wind. It uses six imaging instruments to watch the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before, complemented by in situ instruments to measure the solar wind that flows past the spacecraft.
This video was recorded by the spacecraft's Metis instrument between 12:18 and 20:17 CEST on 12 October 2022. Metis is a coronagraph: it blocks the direct light coming from the Sun's surface to be able to see the much fainter light scattering from charged gas in its outer atmosphere, the corona.
Metis is currently the only instrument able to see the solar wind's twisting dance. No other imaging instrument can see – with a high enough resolution in both space and time – the Sun's inner corona where this dance takes place. (Soon, however, the coronagraph of ESA's Proba-3 mission might be able to see it too!)
The research paper that features this data, ‘Metis observations of Alfvénic outflows driven by interchange reconnection in a pseudostreamer’ by Paolo Romano et al. was published today in The Astrophysical Journal.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.
[Technical details: The starting image of the video shows the full view of Solar Orbiter's Metis coronagraph in red, with an image from the spacecraft's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager in the centre (yellow). Zooming to the top left of this view, we see a video derived from Metis observations. The vertical edge of the video spans 1 274 000 km, or 1.83 solar radii. The contrast in the Metis video has been enhanced by using a ‘running difference’ technique: the brightness of each pixel is given by the average pixel brightness of three subsequent frames, minus the average pixel brightness of the three preceding frames. This processing makes background stars appear as horizontal half-dark, half-light lines. Diagonal bright streaks and flashes are caused by light scattering from dust particles close to the coronagraph.]
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By USH
Io, Jupiter’s famous volcanic moon, is already the most volcanically active place in the solar system. But between Halloween and Christmas of 2024, something happened that was extreme, even by Io’s standards.
Its south pole erupted in a way astronomers weren’t even sure was possible. A super volcano exploded with such force that it was visible from space as a massive dark blotch in the atmosphere. In infrared, the eruption was so intense that it saturated scientific sensors.
How Big Was This Eruption? To grasp the scale, imagine Io were the size of Earth. This super volcano would cover an area larger than Texas, larger than Egypt. The aftermath would trigger a global volcanic winter lasting years, possibly decades.
The eruption unleashed energy equivalent to 260 Yellowstone's and its lava field could bury everything from New York to Kansas under 10 feet of molten rock or stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Every minute, the eruption released energy equal to 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs.
Just think about this: Earth’s most devastating volcanic event, the Siberian Traps eruption, lasted for a million years and led to one of the worst mass extinctions in history. Io’s super volcano, at its current rate, would surpass that in just 800 years. Over a million years, it could spew out the equivalent of 1% of Earth’s entire mantle. If the volume of this eruption were spread evenly across Earth, our planet’s landscape would be completely transformed in a matter of days.
Even in a solar system filled with astonishing phenomena, Io continues to shock and surprise us.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 01:08:00 Watch the replay of our Hera mission Mars flyby event. On 12 March 2025, ESA’s Hera mission came to within 5000 km of the surface of the red planet and 300 km of Mars’s more distant and enigmatic moon Deimos. During this flyby, Hera performed observations of both Mars and the city-sized Deimos. Hera then needed to swing its High Gain Antenna back to Earth to transmit its data home. On Thursday, 13 March, these images were premiered by Hera’s science team from ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, explaining what they reveal, during our public webcast starting at 11:50 CET. The team was joined by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and renowned science fiction writer Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, as well as a surprise special guest!
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