These New Images Show Just How Amazing and Powerful the Sun Is

You’ve never seen the Sun like this.

Transcript

00:00They say you should never stare directly at the sun, and yeah, that's true.

00:07That is, unless you're looking at it through what's called a solar telescope.

00:10And these images of our solar system center were just captured by one of those.

00:14And you've probably never seen it like this before.

00:17ScientAlert reports while each of these images is zoomed in super close,

00:20you're still seeing 51,260 miles of the sun's surface at a time,

00:25revealing what its atmosphere, or what's also known as its chromosphere,

00:28look like at incredible resolutions.

00:31For reference, each of the almost hair-like strands is around 994 miles wide.

00:35It's an atmospheric look in contrast to what's going on underneath.

00:39This photo is another captured by the same solar telescope,

00:42revealing the vivid pattern on the sun's surface more clearly.

00:44The astronomers who took the photos even overlaid an image of the Earth to scale,

00:48just to show how extremely big the field of view for these highly detailed images actually is.

00:53Photos like these are the culmination of more than two decades of research and engineering,

00:57which experts say they would have been impossible to capture without this telescope in the past,

01:01except possibly during a total solar eclipse.