According to the study, the campfires last no more than a few minutes.

The corresponding study will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The team, led by David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, has now studied the properties of 1500 such campfires, thus offering the most comprehensive characterization of the phenomenon to date. EUI scientists have come to refer to the bright areas as 'campfires'. 'The smallest ones we now see for the first time”, he adds. 'We are already familiar with larger flares of this type from the measurement data of other space probes,' says MPS scientist Udo Schühle, EUI Co-Principal Investigator.

In the images, they appear as tiny, bright spots. After all, the 50 images taken by EUI about halfway between Earth and the Sun show the Sun's hot outer atmosphere, known as the corona, in almost unprecedented detail.ĮUI sees areas between 4 kilometers in size that emit extremely short-waved ultraviolet light of high intensity for a short time. However, even the data obtained during the instrument's technical commissioning last year were eagerly awaited. Regular scientific measurements are not scheduled until the end of this year, when the spacecraft will have reached its targeted, highly elliptical orbit around the Sun. Strictly speaking, Solar Orbiter’s instrument EUI is not even in service yet. Once we understand those processes, we may be able to predict the eruptions, which will help us protect our technology.© Sun image: Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/ESA & NASA Data: Berghmans et al (2021) and Chen et al (2021) The researchers hope that now that we can map the corona’s magnetic field, we can work on understanding the processes that lead to eruptions which blast charged particles towards Earth that can damage our satellites and power grids. “The magnetic fields can get twisted and tangled and they can cause eruptions, which can be impactful to Earth, to satellites, GPS systems, power grids.” “These are very small magnetic fields, but they’re important nonetheless,” says Tomczyk. They found it was between 1 and 4 gauss, which is more than 10 times weaker than the magnetic field of a typical refrigerator magnet. The waves are caused by magnetic fields, and their speed is dependent on the plasma density and the magnetic field strengths, so those measurements allowed the researchers to calculate the magnetic field strength across the corona. Read more: The sun is too quiet, which may mean dangerous solar storms in future They also measured the speed of waves that move through the corona like ripples on the ocean. This allowed the team to measure the density of its plasma. Steven Tomczyk at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and his colleagues used a ground-based instrument called the Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter to block out the light from the sun’s disk so the fainter corona wasn’t lost in its glare. That tenuousness, along with the brightness of the disk of the sun, also makes it tough to measure. The plasma – a hot, ionised state of matter – that makes up the corona is incredibly tenuous, which is why it isn’t visible with the naked eye except during a total solar eclipse. This will help us predict solar flares that potentially threaten Earth. The outermost layer of the sun, called the corona, is extraordinarily difficult to study, but now researchers have made the first map of its magnetic field. The magnetic field of the sun’s corona has been mapped for the first time

Sun corona solar flares