The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has recently captured the highest-resolution video ever of the Sun’s corona, the outermost region of the Sun’s atmosphere that extends millions of miles into outer space. This remarkable achievement provides scientists with an unprecedented view of the Sun’s enigmatic corona, which is known for its extreme heat, reaching over 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), much hotter than the Sun’s surface.
The Solar Orbiter took the video sequence when it was 27 million miles (43 million km) from the Sun’s surface, about 29% of the Earth-Sun distance, which is closer than the orbit of the solar system’s innermost planet, Mercury. Each pixel in the video covers an area 65 miles wide (105 km), which means that 17 Earths would fit across the image. The arches of bright plasma visible in the sequence are held in place by powerful magnetic loops that emanate from the Sun’s interior.