On Wednesday, astronomers released what they said were the most detailed images ever taken of the surface of our sun, BOL News learnt.

According to the report of The New York Times, As seen through the brand-new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the sun looks like a boiling pot of popcorn, belying the notion of a bland yellow orb.

Seen from afar, stars are gentle twinkling harbingers of romance and of the mysterious secret order of the universe. Grist for campfire philosophizing and armchair astrobiology.

Up close it is a different story.

Here, 93 million miles from the nearest star — the one we call the sun — the creatures of Earth eke out a living on the edge of almost incomprehensible violence. Every second, thermonuclear reactions in the center of the Sun turn 5 million tons of hydrogen into pure energy. That energy makes its way outward, through boiling gas pocked with magnetic storms that crackle, whirl and lash space with showers of electrical particles and radiation.

More than 7 miles of underground piping are needed just to get rid of the solar heat the telescope collects, and to keep the instrument cool. The greater size of the mirror, abetted by adaptive optics that reduce atmospheric blurring, offers higher resolution — more detail of the pop, crackle and snap on the sun’s surface.

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Somehow this process heats the solar gases from about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as they rise from the surface. In the corona that billows outward from the surface in streamers seen during solar eclipses, temperatures reach 1 million degrees. How does it happen?