See the sun revealed in stunning glory by Solar Orbiter pictures

These fiery images are the clearest views we have ever had of the sun, taken by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, is the most advanced instrument to orbit the sun and has been sending back information to Earth since it arrived there in 2020.

These images were captured in March 2023, when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the sun. The picture above was taken using ultraviolet light, revealing the sun’s outer surface, or corona, in extreme detail and showing the roiling, 1 million °C plasma blasting out along the sun’s magnetic field lines.

To create this full image of the sun’s corona, many smaller zoomed-in pictures had to be stitched together, resulting in this full mosaic consisting of 8000 pixels. In the future, we will get two high-resolution pictures of the sun like this from the Solar Orbiter each year, according to ESA.

This second image is what the surface, or photosphere, of the sun looks like when viewed by the Solar Orbiter in visible light, the same light we can see with our eyes. This layer of the sun has a temperature of between about 4500 and 6000°C. The dark regions here are sunspots, which are cooler than the surrounding areas and emit less light.

When viewed using the spacecraft’s magnetic instruments, the sun’s magnetic field can be seen to be concentrated around the sunspot regions (see image above). The field directs charged particles away from these regions, cooling them down and giving them their dark appearance.

The Solar Orbiter can also track the speed and direction of the plasma moving at the sun’s surface. In this velocity map (above), called a tachogram, blue represents movement towards the spacecraft and red away from it, showing that the sun’s plasma mostly turns with the spin of the planet, but diverges around the sunspot regions.

This collection of images will help scientists understand the behaviour of the sun’s corona and photosphere. The Solar Orbiter will also image the sun’s poles, on the top and bottom of the star, which we haven’t seen before. We don’t currently understand the solar poles well and researchers expect these areas to look markedly different from the other regions of the sun.

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