They look like small dots of pepper on a tasty egg yolk, or an ‘archipelago’ – a big group of islands on some faraway yellow planet. 

But the latest set of snaps from NASA actually show a cluster of ‘sunspots’ – cooler parts on the sun’s surface caused by massive changes in our star’s magnetic field. 

The images were captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been monitoring the sun from space for more than a decade.

While they look small in the images, together the ‘archipelago’ of sunspots is actually wider than 15 Earths – around 120,000 miles across. 

Scientists warn they could shoot out violent explosions of energy towards Earth, causing geomagnetic storms that pose a danger to power grids and satellites. 

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