Science Nugget: Velocity field in the solar granulation from two vantage points

22 January 2025

In the solar photosphere, a bright cell pattern called granules are surrounded by a dark channel called intergranular lanes [1]. A granule is a manifestation of an overshooting of a hot upflow from the convectively unstable subsurface layers into the stable photosphere. This vigorous convective process results in generating dynamical... read more

Science Nugget: First joint X-ray solar microflare observations with NuSTAR and Solar Orbiter/STIX

15 January 2025

Hard X-rays (HXR) serve as an important diagnostic for plasma heating and particle acceleration. Therefore, they are crucial for studying flare energy release processes, which are not fully understood. Microflares (GOES B class and smaller flares) are good candidates for studying these processes as they occur more frequently and usually with... read more

Science Nugget: Shocks in tandem: Solar Orbiter observes a fully formed forward-reverse shock pair in the inner heliosphere

18 December 2024

The Sun is an active star, responsible for creating a highly dynamic and complex environment, namely the heliosphere. Solar eruptive phenomena are key consequences of such activity, which recently reached the peak of its 11-years cycle, and their study is of paramount importance to understand many unsolved mysteries of how energy is converted... read more

Science Nugget: High-Energy Insights from an Escaping Coronal Mass Ejection

11 December 2024

Solar eruptive events, consisting of both solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), represent some of the most energetically dynamic phenomena in our solar system. These events involve the rapid release of magnetic energy, which is converted into plasma heating, particle acceleration, and kinetic energy driving the CME. Understanding... read more

Science nugget: Investigation of Venus plasma tail using spacecraft flybys

4 December 2024

Venus lacks a global magnetic field but generates an induced magnetosphere through its interaction with the solar wind. This interaction has been studied mainly close to the planet while the far tail has been less sampled. While the main objectives of Solar Orbiter are related to the Sun and the solar wind, the mission also provides a bonus... read more

Science nugget: Testing the Flux Expansion Factor – Solar Wind Speed Relation with Solar Orbiter data

27 November 2024 The presence of “open” magnetic field lines in the solar atmosphere is associated with magnetic flux tubes evolving into solar wind streams subject to the “frozen-in” condition of plasmas. In this study, we statistically test the v - f anticorrelation, exploiting the Solar Orbiter capability to sample a broader range of radial distances compared... read more

Science nugget: The role of small scale EUV brightenings in the quiet Sun coronal heating

20 November 2024 How the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, namely the solar corona, is maintained to a temperature of more than 1 MK, about 1000 times the photosphere, is an unsolved problem of paramount importance in heliophysics. Observations of impulsive emissions showed that the ones associated with the largest energy scales (from 10^26 to 10^32 erg)... read more

New full Sun views show sunspots, fields and restless plasma

20 November 2024 Zoom into Solar Orbiter's four new Sun images, assembled from high-resolution observations by the spacecraft's PHI and EUI instruments made on 22 March 2023. The PHI images are the highest-resolution full views of the Sun's visible surface to date, including maps of the Sun's messy magnetic field and movement on the surface. These can be... read more