Incredible Nasa footage captures how the Sun changes over the span of a decade

Nasa has released jaw-dropping footage of the sun over the course of the last 10 years.

An hour-long video that the organisation released on YouTube shows a picture of the sun every 0.75 seconds.

The pictures were taken between the dates of 2 June 2010 and 1 June 2020. The video captures the various activities that the Sun experiences in an 11-year cycle such as transiting planets and eruptions.

This video was mad possible thanks to Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory which has now been operating constantly for over a decade while it orbits planet Earth.

During those 10 years, it took a staggering 425 million high-resolution images of the sun and obtained 20 million gigabytes of data all in order to study the sun and how it influences our solar system.

That being said the SDO has not been able to keep a constant eye on the sun. You may notice in the video that there are a few moments where it blacks out.

This is thanks to the noon as it eclipses the sun and moves between the spacecraft and the star. There was also a problem in 2016 with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which lasted for a week but was soon restored.

The SDO is still in orbit and who knows in another ten years we could be looking at more videos that the spacecraft has produced of our nearest star.