NASA and the European Space Agency released the closest ever images of the sun , revealing a glimpse at campfires exploding on the surface of the solar systems star.

The images were taken by the Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft operated by NASA and ESA that successfully launched in February from Cape Canaveral, Florida, despite less-than-ideal work-from-home conditions and a skeleton crew necessitated by COVID-19.

The crafts mission is studying the sun up close, taking high-resolution images of the suns poles for the first time and understanding the sun-Earth connection, according to the ESA website .

Holly Gilbert, a scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, called the pictures unprecedented visuals that will help scientists piece together the suns atmospheric layers and develop a stronger understanding of space weather, according to a news release Thursday.

Particularly notable in the images were several small explosions on the suns surface. David Berghmans, an astrophysicist who worked on the Solar Orbiter project at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, described them as campfires.

Scientists speculate that they are nanoflares, mini-explosions on the surface that are thought to play a role in heating the suns outer atmosphere, or corona , to much higher temperatures than the surface itself.