Fiery rings of ionised gas erupt from the sun in the first videos taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The satellite is delivering unprecedented views of the star, which could help untangle the mysteries of its magnetic field and improve forecasts of solar storms on Earth.
The observatory, which launched on 11 February, takes ultra-sharp images of the entire disc of the sun – previous high-resolution satellites could see only small portions of its surface at once.
"It is the most comprehensive view of the sun," Madhulika Guhathakurta, the mission's programme scientist at NASA, said at a press briefing on Wednesday. "When you see the whole sun, it is showing connections we have never seen before."
One of the probe's instruments, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), uses four telescopes to study the sun's surface and atmosphere. It caught a giant gas loop called a prominence shooting out from the sun on 30 March (first part of video). Prominences are confined by the sun's magnetic fields, whose origin and behaviour are not well understood.
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