Claims have been circulating on social media suggesting that a series of images allegedly showing the sun from incredibly close proximity were captured by the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Aditya L1 spacecraft. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This series of images show the closest pictures of the sun taken by ISRO’s Aditya L1.
Fact: These images have been available on the internet since at least 2010, significantly predating the launch of the Aditya L1 mission on 02 September 2023. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
We began our fact-check process with a reverse image search of the viral images. This led us to web pages that contained the same images, which date back to 2010 and 2022.
The images found were posted on an online astronomical community forum called ‘Cloudy Nights’ by a user named Robert Arnold, with a clear watermark indicating the date of capture as 13 March 2010. This indicated that these images could not possibly have been captured by the Aditya L1 spacecraft, as it was only launched years later in 2023.
ISRO has indeed released images captured by the Aditya L1 spacecraft, which are available for viewing on their official platforms (here and here).
However, the European Space Agency (ESA) / National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Solar Orbiter captured the closest sun images. In fact, one of the images taken by the Solar Orbiter is touted as ‘the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.’
To sum up, the images alleged to have been captured by ISRO’s Aditya L1 predate the launch of the Aditya L1 mission.
