Newly released images of the Sun are the highest-resolution pictures of our star ever taken and they reveal its atmosphere is much more complex than first thought 

Scientists from the University of Central Lancashire and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center studied the images taken by the space-based NASA High-Resolution Coronal Imager telescope.

The pictures revealed that parts of the Sun's atmosphere, thought to be dark or mostly empty, are filled with strands of hot electrified gasses 311 miles wide. 

Each of those strands are up to 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit and are larger than the distance between London and Belfast, according to researchers.