You’ve seen the sun, but you’ve never seen the sun like this. This single frame from a video taken by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission shows the sun looking very puffy! As the Sun moves into the much hotter outer corona, you can see fuzzy, hair-like structures made of plasma following magnetic field lines in the lower part of the Sun’s atmosphere. The video was taken from approximately one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Watch the full video below, which shows the sun’s unusual features such as coronal moss, spicules, and coronal rain. The brightest areas are around 1 million degrees Celsius, while colder material appears darker because it absorbs radiation, ESA said.

So what is crown moss? This is what gives the sun its puffy appearance here. These strange structures on the Sun are similar to the algae we find on Earth in that they resemble fine lacy shapes. However, on the Sun, they are generally found around the center of sunspot groups, where magnetic conditions are strong and large coronal loops form. The moss is so hot that most instruments cannot detect it. Algae covers two layers of the atmosphere, the chromosphere and the corona.

Spicules, as the name suggests, are tall towers of gas emerging from the Sun’s chromosphere, visible above the solar horizon. They can reach altitudes of 10,000 km (6,000 mi).

You will see the coronal shower at about 0:30 of the video. This material is cooler than the rest of the solar surface (probably less than 10,000°C), compared to 1 million degrees C in the coronal cycles. The rain consists of denser clumps of plasma that fall back towards the sun under the influence of gravity.

Approximately 0:20 into the video. Did you see the small explosion in the middle of the field of view at 2 seconds? Does the coolant mostly rise before falling back? It’s not small at all; This explosion is bigger than the Earth!

Missions like Solar Orbiter, Parker Solar Probe, and Solar Dynamics Observatory are giving us unprecedented views of the Sun, helping astronomers learn more about the dynamic ball of gas that powers our entire Solar System.