There is no better word for this image of the sun as spectacular, which means something impressive, dramatic or remarkable that creates a spectacle or a visual effect. It comes from the spectacular Latin word, which means a show, a spectacle or a public exhibition. The ancient Romans would agree to the word choice if they could somehow show them the picture.
This composite image of the sun was created from 200 individual images, which were taken from the Solar Orbiter of the ESA. It shows the corona of the sun, its million-grade atmosphere, in UV. The spaceship took the photos on March 9, 2025 when it was about 77 million km from the sun.
The sun orbiter showed different regions of the sun in a 5×5 grille. During each point, the spaceship learned six high-resolution and two wide-angle images with its extreme ultraviolet imager, an instrument that is supposed to examine the sun-chromosphere and the corona.
The gray region shows the 5×5 network in a position on the sun surface. Photo credits: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/Eui-Team, D. Berghmans (Rob) license CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The picture shows coronal grinding, solar prevention and filaments. Interested readers can download a high -resolution image so that you can enlarge incredible details.
It is easy to get lost in the incredible details of the picture. The loop structures in the sun are known. They are plasma and magnetic field structures that have their roots in the photos and extend into the corona. You can take weeks and even months and extend for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Sometimes they dissolve from the sun and become coronal mass changes (CMES).
When CMES hits the earth, you can trigger geomagnetic storms that, if they are strong enough, damage power grids and cause another chaos. This is one of the main reasons why scientists study the sun. Cmes and the constant sun wind are together together with space weather.
Studying the sun also helps scientists to understand star physics and star development. Many of the processes of the sun, such as nuclear fusion and plasmadynamics, are available elsewhere in the universe, which makes the sun a natural laboratory for observing these processes.
If you want to download the large, high -resolution image, visit this.
