Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency mission with support from NASA, has been studying the Sun like never before. It just delivered some incredible new observations of the Sun, which include the highest-resolution view of the full disk in visible light. Get ready to see our star in unprecedented detail.

The spacecraft’s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) is responsible for studying the surface of the Sun, also known as the photosphere. It does that by snapping images as well as measuring the magnetic field and the movement of the surface. As if this was not enough, the researchers also used the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument to snap images of the Sun’s atmosphere, where we see the most dramatic activity of our star.

The images were taken less than 74 million kilometers (46 million miles) away from the Sun on March 22, 2023. The Sun is big so the instruments have to take multiple images that were then stitched together. Each image is made of 25 photographs and the Sun has a diameter of nearly 8,000 pixels in each mosaic, revealing a wealth of insights such as details of its magnetism.

“The Sun’s magnetic field is key to understanding the dynamic nature of our home star from the smallest to the largest scales. These new high-resolution maps from Solar Orbiter’s PHI instrument show the beauty of the Sun’s surface magnetic field and flow in great detail. At the same time, they are crucial for inferring the magnetic field in the Sun’s hot corona, which our EUI instrument is imaging,” noted Daniel Müller, Solar Orbiter’s Project Scientist, in a statement.

The PHI images show the hot bubbling plasma of the Sun and how it creates solar granules, the convection cells of hot plasma coming from the inner layers. The movement is also seen in the tachogram showing the velocity of the surface. In general, the plasma rotates with the Sun (blue towards the spacecraft and red away from it) but is pushed outward around sunspots.

Sunspots are certainly the show stealers of the magnetogram. These regions are much cooler than the rest of the photosphere, related to the intense magnetic field lines which then are seen in the complex glow of plasma in the solar corona once we switch to the EUI view of the Sun.

This was a follow-up from previous full views of the Sun by Solar Orbiter. We hope that there will be more views – especially for this year, since the Sun has reached its maximum activity and Solar Orbiter is one of the new missions revealing what happens during this time in greater detail than ever before.

Zoomable images from Solar Orbiter can be perused here.