A mosaic of the Sun

What you see is the Sun’s million-degree hot atmosphere, called the corona, as it looks in ultraviolet light. This large view was created by assembling 200 individual images taken on 9 March 2025 by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission, resulting in the widest high-resolution 'portrait’ of the Sun ever produced. 

Solar Orbiter is the most complex scientific laboratory ever sent to our life-giving star, taking images of the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before and being the first to look at its polar regions. By observing solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the solar wind up close, it helps scientists understand how solar activity forms and evolves and improve predictions of space weather that can affect Earth.