A SOLAR PROBE LAUNCHED BY NASA CAPTURES THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PHOTO OF THE SUN
In February 2020, the Solar Orbiter—a joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)—was launched. It has since collected data that aids astronomers in forecasting solar storms and understanding the unstable solar surface. With the help of its ten cutting-edge instruments, it is the most sophisticated scientific lab that humanity has ever sent to our closest star. Its accomplishment of capturing the broadest high-resolution image of the sun to date is among its greatest achievements.
The Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) collected 200 separate images over the course of four and a half hours to create this historic image. The final image displays the appearance of the sun's corona, or its extremely hot atmosphere, in ultraviolet light. With a diameter of 1.4 million kilometres, the sun alone takes up roughly 7,505 pixels, whereas the image itself is 12,544 x 12,544 pixels, according to the ESA.
Viewers can marvel at the sweeping, luminous patterns that comprise our star thanks to the image size. Because of this, the ESA has even pushed the public to be amazed by specific features, such as the dazzling coronal loops around active regions and the somewhat cooler filaments and prominences, which are distinguished by their darker hue.
“Obtaining such a detailed image is no easy feat,” writes the ESA. “On 9 March 2025, at around 77 million km from the sun, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was oriented to point to different regions across the sun in a 5 x 5 grid. At each pointing direction, the [EUI] instrument captured six images at high resolution and two wide-angle views.”
This image is one of the most illuminating astronomical images recently released, joining the closest-ever images of the sun collected by NASA's Parker Solar Probe in late 2024. Following the release of these photos, Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA's Washington headquarters, states, "With our eyes, not only with models, we are experiencing where space weather risks to Earth begin." "This new data will help us greatly improve our space weather predictions to preserve our technology here on Earth and throughout the solar system, as well as to secure the safety of our astronauts."