NASA Took an X-Ray of the Sun and It’s Trippy AF

Despite being the closest star to Earth, there’s still a whole lot we don’t understand about the sun. For example, the sun’s outer atmosphere—or the corona—reaches temperatures 100 times hotter than its surface and researchers still don’t fully understand why this is.

That’s why NASA recently took the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), one of the agency’s most powerful x-ray telescopes, and pointed it at the sun. Since it’s able to make x-ray observations, the probe is capable of picking up on light from areas of the star that might be the source of the corona’s insanely hot temperatures.

The agency created a composite image of the NuSTAR data with images gathered from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s X-ray Telescope—and the results are absolutely trippy.

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