The Solar Orbiter probe of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA has captured never-so-close images of our star. On 26 March, from within the orbit of the planet Mercury, with temperatures of about 500 degrees Celsius, the probe returned spectacular imagery of the Sun. While much data collected must still be analyzed by scientists, videos show a variety of “new” phenomena in the solar atmosphere, including a mysterious formation of hot gas reaching out in all directions nicknamed by scientists “the hedgehog”. The mission of the Solar Orbiter is to study the external atmosphere of the star and the dynamics of the heliosphere.
