Many years ago I experienced a VR tour of the solar system on Oculus. I never fully comprehended just how big the sun was until going on that tour. Something about being able to float around in space, and see the planets stacked next to the sun going off into the horizon and looking up and down and all around at the sun, just a really cool VR exclusive experience.<p>Fascinated to hear what they learn from this orbiter. We're currently in the deepest solar minimum of the space age, so I wonder if they'll discover anything related to the mechanisms that drive them.
What is this thing here? <a href="https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/hxiwfe6.png</a> (around 25%-25% from top left)<p>Looks distinctly not part of the corona, more like a pod of some sorts, and it also jitters around in the video. I'm puzzled!
Those are some amazingly beautiful images. And for some reason, I'm reminded of the comet-core ship that surfs just above the Sun's convection tops in <i>The Killing Star</i>, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Also the ~analogous ships mentioned in Vernor Vinge's <i>Marooned in Realtime</i>, and in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" trilogy.
I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.
Haha these cookie popups, I don't know why I'm hesitant to take action on them. So like this site on mobile I'll read the article through half my phone screen.
This is another reminder of just how little space exploration has happened so far... I'm kinda amazed no one's ever just thrown a probe at the sun to get as much data as possible before it burns. I get a similar feeling staring at the bare handful of images from the surface of Venus.
"Published", not "revealed".<p>I'm sorry. This just annoys me so much. There's two perfectly good words that pretty much always should be used instead of "revealed": "Published", or "Announced".