59: Living With A Star

The Sun — so close, we can almost touch it. (Don't, that would be bad.) Yet astronomers have so much to learn about our nearest star. Just a few weeks ago, the ESA Solar Orbiter launched, off on a mission to orbit the sun (hence the name) and catch a good look at the Sun's poles for the first time. It joins the Parker Solar Probe, which is lining up to take some deep dives nice and close to the Sun. And to top it all off, the world's largest ground-based solar observatory, the Daniel K. Inouye Telescope, just took some a-maz-ing images of the Sun's surface.