A solar prominence hovers over the sun

The sun is always mesmerizing to watch, but Solar Orbiter captured a special treat on camera: a dark ‘prominence’ sticking out from the side of the sun.

The dark-looking material is dense plasma (charged gas) trapped by the sun’s complex magnetic field. It looks dark because it is cooler than its surroundings, being around 10 000 °C compared to the surrounding million-degree plasma.

When viewed against the background of space, the hovering plasma is referred to as a prominence. When viewed against the sun’s surface, it is called a filament. (In this image you can see examples of both.)

Solar prominences and filaments extend for tens of thousands of kilometers, several times the diameter of Earth. They can last days or even months. This video shows one hour of footage, sped up to make movement more clearly visible.

Solar Orbiter recorded this video with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on 17 March 2025. At the time, the spacecraft was around 63 million km from the sun, similar to planet Mercury.