Scientists have made some progress in understanding the Sun's surface, and as technology advances, humans can begin to take more high definition images of the surface - unlocking more knowledge about how it all works.
Now, astronomers have released some of the sharpest images yet taken of the sun's atmosphere, and as you can see in the above image, the sun's is covered in extremely hot plasma threads. These fine threads of plasma aren't tiny, in fact, the smallest of the strands measure in at 200km wide, and some of the biggest being recorded to be roughly 513km in diameter. Up until now, scientists couldn't view inside the solar corona, so they didn't know that these fine filaments were there.
Amy Winebarger, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, "We're seeing threads pop out where we see nothing in other instruments." These extremely sharp images were taken using NASA's High-Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C for short. NASA sends this small telescope up into space aboard a rocket, and then it floats around in space taking photos of the sun for about 5 minutes, then it falls back to Earth. If you are interested in checking out a close-up video of the Sun's surface, check out this link here. An extremely high-resolution image can be found here too.
