Ever wondered what the sun looks like close up? Nasa has posted a video showing its surface in extremely fine detail
When you get close up to the sun, it's no longer a big, glowing ball of light – there's a lot more going on than meets the eye from 150m km away.
Nasa has posted an ultra-high definition 4K video of its surface, created by putting together a series of images taken by the space agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.
Called “Thermonuclear Art”, it shows how active solar regions shoot out of the surface, or “blossom”, in unprecedented detail. It's 30 minutes long, so there's plenty to feast your eyes on.
The Goddard Space Center, said the video “presents the nuclear fire of our life-giving star in intimate detail, offering new perspective into our own relationships with grand forces of the solar system.”
Different temperatures can, in turn, show specific structures on the sun such as solar flares, which are gigantic explosions of light and x-rays, or coronal loops, which are stream of solar material travelling up and down looping magnetic field lines.