Out of this world: why the most important art today is made in space

Forget the Turner prize. This is art that reflects the true grandeur of the universe – it is the Sistine Chapel of the scientific age

It’s all about scale. A black dot is moving across the face of a blazing giant. The shadow of the planet looks tiny, compared with the vast flaming orb of the sun embracing it, whose flares and vortices of unimaginable heat shudder the imagination. What a brilliant way to convey the size and power of the star we orbit. But these images of the transit of Mercury on 9 May are not artist’s impressions. They’re real.

Many people watched the transit from Earth, but no earthbound telescope could match the view available to Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), an unmanned spacecraft launched in 2010, the five-year mission of which is to observe the sun in unprecedented detail. Its spectacular images of the transit held the front pages of newspapers, but they were merely the latest in a series of revelatory views of our star that the spacecraft has beamed back to Earth. Images from the SDO have once again been making headlines – they show in eerie ultraviolet a vast, black void that has opened in the sun’s glowing surface.

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