5 years into its mission, Photo voltaic Orbiter stuns once more with this detailed view of the Solar. What you see is the Solar’s million-degree sizzling ambiance, known as the corona, because it appears to be like in ultraviolet mild.
Dive in and discover the new plasma (charged particles) caught within the Solar’s messy magnetic discipline. Can you notice the glowing coronal loops round lively areas, and the darker, cooler filaments and prominences?
Acquiring such an in depth picture isn’t any straightforward feat. On 9 March 2025, at round 77 million km from the Solar, the Photo voltaic Orbiter spacecraft was oriented to level to completely different areas throughout the Solar in a 5 x 5 grid. At every pointing course, the Excessive Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument captured six photos at excessive decision and two wide-angle views.
The picture you see right here combines a whopping 200 particular person photos into the widest high-resolution view of the Solar but. (See earlier full Solar views right here.)
Photo voltaic Orbiter is an area mission of worldwide collaboration between ESA and NASA. The Excessive Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB).
[Image description: The Sun looks like a warm yellow sphere with a surface covered with glowing messy hair. The yellow glow extends to the edges of the image, with some regions brighter than others. Many bright yellow arcs stick out from a wide band around the Sun’s equator. A darker region stands out across a roughly horizontal line near the Sun’s south pole. The bright arcs and some darker material can also be seen around the Sun’s edges.]
[Technical details: This large image was assembled from images taken between 13:06 and 17:31 UTC (14:06–18:31 CET) on 9 March 2025 by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at a wavelength of 17.4 nanometres. Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from a latitude 11.4° below the equator at a distance of around 77 million km. The final image is 12544 x 12544 pixels in size, corresponding 6171.6 x 6171.6 arc seconds or 2325.5 x 2325.5 million km. The Sun, which has a diameter of 1.4 million km, spans around 7505 pixels and 3692.6 arc seconds.]
