People like to joke, when it’s really hot, that it’s “like the surface of the sun or something.” People should not say that. They should say it’s like the atmosphere of the sun, which is way hotter. The solar corona is around 2 to 4 million degrees Fahrenheit, and it gets hotter as you move farther away from the surface. This bizarre fact has stymied scientists for decades, but now they have some answers--all thanks to a tiny telescope that flew beyond Earth’s atmosphere for just a few minutes.

NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the solar corona during its brief journey last summer.