Hot stuff... our Sun today.

Nasa/SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope

It took about eight minutes for the light making up this image to travel from our very own star (also known as the Sun) to Nasa’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). See the bright twisted clouds of hot gas, revealing storminess, and the dark, calm regions called “coronal holes”. These images, obtained with invisible ultraviolet light, give scientists their routine weather maps of the Sun.

Occasionally a solar flare appears as a small, intensely bright flash. Different colours denote various ultraviolet wavelengths, each emanating from gas at a particular temperature: orange – 80 000 degrees; blue – 1 000 000 degrees; green – 1 500 000 degrees; and yellow – 2 500 000 degrees. Just in case the question comes up in a quiz...