The corona flows into the solar wind, which speeds away from the sun at about a million miles an hour, out to the edges of the solar system. Instead, the corona is millions of degrees-and scientists don’t know how or why. “But that does not work with the corona,” says Raouafi. One would expect that as you move away from a hot object, things would get cooler. Mysteriously, this part of the sun is hotter than the material at the surface, which is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “That happens in a very explosive way.” The bursts can be tiny in solar scales (a bit bigger than the island of Sicily), while others are enormous mass ejections, larger than a planet.Ībove that churning surface is the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, where diffuse hot gas floats. “You now have a sudden release of plasma that's driven by what’s called magnetic reconnection,” says solar astrophysicist Yeimy Rivera of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Sometimes those cross one another, twist further, and like a rubber band, they snap with a burst of hot and fast-moving plasma and radiation. Magnetic field lines pierce the surface as loops, twisting and dancing. At the surface, we see this convection occurring in structures that scientists call granules, creating a scale-like pattern on the surface, as seen in images from the Inouye Solar Telescope. Material closer to the surface also rises and falls, like liquid boiling in a pan. Roiling plasma moves through the sun, rotating at different speeds as the sun spins. Those flows of charged plasma generate the threads of the sun’s magnetic fields. Layers of negatively charged electrons and positively charged particles called ions flow, like liquid, through the sun’s interior. Like other stars, the sun is a giant ball of hot plasma it’s so hot that the gas atoms can’t hold on to their electrons. The sun is the only star scientists can investigate in detail, and the only one they can watch evolve in real time. With new views of the sun, scientists can not only plan to protect our astronauts and electronics from any harmful solar eruptions, they could also learn about the mysterious physical processes that power stars across the universe. Scientists have found from models that some of these magnetic fields twist, spanning just tens of feet, and snap in seconds-tiny events that can hurl huge amounts of plasma into space. Parker and another spacecraft, the European Solar Orbiter, are beginning to untangle the threads of the sun’s magnetism, and they’re learning how small flares and explosions are crucial to driving solar activity. This video was taken by the Wide-Field Imager (WISPR) instrument. But those same particles can also knock out satellites, shut down power grids, and even harm astronauts in space.ĭuring the Parker Solar Probe’s eighth orbit around the sun, the spacecraft flew through structures in the corona called streamers. The larger blasts send charged particles to nearly the speed of light, and if those particles hit Earth, they can affect our planet’s magnetic field and create stunning aurora light shows. These magnetic fields periodically cause Jupiter-size flares and even larger blasts called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Images from the telescope show convective cells that scientists call granules, where hot plasma is rising from below and cooler material is sinking down-one of the motions generating a complex web of magnetic fields. The Inouye Solar Telescope, which began science operations in 2022, can image features on the sun as small as 20 kilometers. “From the data we already got, we’ve opened so many new questions, and we’ve discovered phenomena that we didn’t even know existed,” says astrophysicist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland, the project scientist of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, one of the spacecraft currently orbiting the sun.

Solar orbiter sun image