#NASA releases closest-ever photos of the sun’s surface

NASA has released the closest images ever snapped of the sun’s surface — offering a rare glimpse of the glowing yellow orb, according to the agency.

“These unprecedented pictures of the sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” Holly Gilbert, a NASA scientist who worked on the project, said in a press release. “[They] will help scientists piece together the sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.”

The out-of-this-world photos, which show lava-like swirls of scalding-hot hydrogen, were shot by the Solar Orbiter — a satellite operated by NASA and the European Space Agency — in June, as it came within 48 million miles of the sun.

Scientists also noted that the photos show mysterious little flares dotted around the sun’s surface that they’ve dubbed “campfires.”

“The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” principal investigator David Berghmans said. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.”

The images of the sun

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The images of the sun

Reuters

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It’s not exactly clear what the campfires are yet, NASA noted.

Other dazzling images reveal the upper atmosphere of the sun, dubbed the corona — which has a temperature of more than a million degrees.

To shoot the photos, captured in late May and early June, scientists used a cutting-edge remote-sensing telescope with a high-resolution camera.

Scientists working on the mission were reduced to a skeleton crew due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, NASA said.

But the remotely operated spacecraft completed its mission in time for a close “solar pass” on June 15.

“We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.”