By 
NASA (solar orbiter spacecraft)
The European Space Agency has revealed a stunning picture taken by its Solar Orbiter, a sophisticated spacecraft structured to capture the Sun from much closer than Earth — and spoiler alert, it’s pretty incredible.
You can watch a zoomed out version below, but to really appreciate the elegance of the picture, it’s worth capturing here for the full-resolution version. That little speck in the upper right corner? Yep, that’s the entirety of the Earth to scale.
The consequences was merged together from 25 different shots, the ESA described, taken by the Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instrument as the spacecraft passed directly between the Earth and the Sun. The investigation was about halfway between the Earth and our star at the time.
At the time of imaging campaign on March 7, Solar Orbiter operators also captured pictures with the spacecraft’s Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument, which showed the temperature gradient throughout the sun’s atmosphere. The unusual thermal behavior of the sun’s atmosphere is one of the star’s biggest mysteries. Instead of getting colder with distance, the sun’s atmosphere is actually considerably hotter at higher altitudes.
The concluding data, as per the agency, could result in unprecedented scientific knowledge of eruptions on the surface of our star and how they relate to things occurring deeper down into the solar atmosphere.
But to the layperson, the picture is also just a incredible reminder of the beauty, complexity and raw power of the star around which we all orbit.
