There’s no better word for this image of the Sun than Spectacular, which means something impressive, dramatic, or remarkable that creates a spectacle or visual impact. It comes from the Latin word spectaculum, which means a show, spectacle, or public exhibition. Ancient Romans would agree with the word choice if you could somehow show the image to them.
This composite image of the Sun was constructed from 200 individual images captured by the ESA’s Solar Orbiter. It shows the Sun’s corona, its million-degree atmosphere, in UV. The spacecraft captured the photos on March 9th, 2025, when it was about 77 million km from the Sun.
The Solar Orbiter pointed at different regions of the Sun in a 5×5 grid. During each pointing, the spacecraft captured six high-resolution and two wide-angle images with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, an instrument designed to study the Sun’s chromosphere and Corona.
The grey region shows the 5×5 grid in one position on the Sun’s surface. Image Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team, D. Berghmans (ROB) LICENCE CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The image shows coronal loops, solar prominences, and filaments. Interested readers can download a high-resolution image, allowing them to zoom in on incredible detail.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the incredible details of the image. The looping structures on the Sun’s limb are prominences. They’re plasma and magnetic field structures that have their roots in the photosphere and extend into the corona. They can last weeks and even months, extending for hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Sometimes, they detach from the Sun and become coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
When CMEs strike Earth, they can trigger geomagnetic storms that, if strong enough, can damage power grids and cause other mayhem. That’s one of the primary reasons scientists study the Sun. CMEs and the constant solar wind are collectively called space weather.
Studying the Sun also helps scientists understand stellar physics and stellar evolution. Many of the Sun’s processes, like nuclear fusion and plasma dynamics, are present elsewhere in the Universe, making the Sun a natural laboratory for observing those processes.
If you’d like to download the large, high-res image, visit this.