The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter has offered an exciting new perspective on our sun. For the first time, scientists have captured detailed images of the sun’s magnetic field near its south pole. These images reveal unexpected behaviors, including bright arcs formed by magnetic structures moving rapidly towards the sun’s edge.
Historically, studying the sun’s poles has been challenging. Orbiting spacecraft typically focus on the sun’s equatorial regions, leaving the poles largely unexplored. However, in March 2025, Solar Orbiter adjusted its orbit, allowing researchers to observe the sun’s southern limb for the first time.
According to Sami Solanki, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, understanding the sun’s magnetic cycle is crucial. “We still lack knowledge of what happens at the sun’s poles,” he explained. Solar Orbiter’s data now fills this gap, bringing new insights into the sun’s complex behavior.
The sun operates on an 11-year magnetic cycle, where its magnetic fields twist and reset, causing sunspots and solar flares. This cycle is driven by significant plasma currents called “supergranules,” which act like massive bubbles of churning plasma. These currents move magnetic fields toward the poles at surprising speeds of 20 to 45 miles per hour—much faster than scientists had predicted.
This new study utilizes data from two main instruments on the Solar Orbiter: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). Together, these tools map how hot plasma and magnetic fields are distributed across the solar surface, allowing scientists to observe the intricate details of magnetic activities.
Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, who led the research, emphasized the importance of these findings: “The supergranules at the poles make this part of the sun’s magnetic system visible for the first time.” This research opens doors to understanding the solar cycle better and how it influences space weather conditions that can affect Earth.
The paper detailing these findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. As interest in solar phenomena grows, this research could pave the way for exciting discoveries about our sun and its impact on the solar system.
For further exploration, more details can be found in the original study, which sheds light on the sun’s behavior and its magnetic field, vital to grasping the dynamics of space weather that can affect technology and life on Earth.
