Images

Solar Orbiter is getting ready for the first of many gravity assist flybys of Venus on 27 December, to start bringing it closer to the Sun and tilting its orbit in order to observe our star from different perspectives. 

- The official starting date is the 1st of July and I'm very excited to get the project up and running, says Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Kohutova who received the grant from The Norwegian Research Council.

Coronal rain is one of the most striking features of the solar atmosphere. With the higher resolution of the European Solar Telescope, solar physicists will better understand their structure and formation.

Quiet Sun magnetic fields are thought to significantly contribute to the energy and heating of the solar atmosphere. The question is: how much?

Remember what slender Ca II H chromospheric filbrils are? The advanced optics of the future 4-m European Solar Telescope - EST will unveil these small-scale fibrillar structures, the waves they support and their magnetic fields.

Nanoflares are low energy events, difficult to observe due to their low X-ray energies. The European Solar Telescope will help us unveil these fast events. 

Solar coronal jets are extremely fast ejections of hot plasma triggered by a physical mechanism known as magnetic reconnection. The European Solar Telescope will shed light on this interesting phenomenon.

The European Solar Telescope (EST), a new 4 meter class solar telescope to be built in the Canary Islands (Spain), will help solar researchers to discern the ultimate details of reconnection at the finest spatial scales thanks to its superb spatial resolution. 

Surges are solar ejections that can be as large as the Earth - or even bigger- and relatively cool (in solar standards), which makes them a very interesting topic to study. With the European Solar Telescope we will able to capture the elusive details of the physical processes that lead to surges.