Solar Orbiter Sends Back Jaw-Dropping Image Of Sun's Corona

By Jamie Carter, Senior Contributor.
Apr 27, 2025, 07:30am EDT



The sun’s million-degree hot atmosphere, called the corona, as it looks in ultraviolet light, taken by ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft on March 9, 2025.
ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, E. Kraaikamp (ROB)


The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft — launched in February 2020 and taking the first-ever images of the sun at close range — has sent back one of the most detailed images of our star.

The widest high-resolution view of the sun so far was assembled from 200 images taken on March 9, 2025, while Solar Orbiter was about 48 million miles (77 million kilometers) from the sun. The sun is 93 million miles (148 million kilometers) from Earth.

It shows the sun's hotter outer atmosphere, its corona (crown), the source of the solar wind — a stream of charged particles coming at Earth from the sun — and the space weather that causes geomagnetic storms and aurora. The image captures only ultraviolet — electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths shorter than visible light and invisible to the human eye.



A composite of the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse. (Photo by: VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

What Is The Corona?

The sun's corona is always in the sky, but it's overwhelmed by the sun's photosphere, which is a million times brighter. However, the corona's temperature is around 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius), 150 times hotter than the photosphere.

More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2025/04/27/solar-orbiter-sends-back-jaw-dropping-image-of-suns-corona/