Humanity Has Just Glimpsed Part of The Sun We’ve Never Seen Before

It would possibly appear to be a typical patch of Sun, however what you’re looking at within the symbol above is a sight humanity hasn’t ever noticed ahead of.

It’s in truth the Sun’s south pole, and our first-ever glimpse of this area comes courtesy of a daredevil maneuver by way of Solar Orbiter, which plunged underneath the airplane of the Solar System to catch an indirect glimpse of part of the Sun normally hidden from view.

“Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole,” says astrophysicist Carole Mundell, director of science of the European Space Agency (ESA).

“The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life, and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behavior. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”

The poles of the Sun have long been a white whale for solar physics. Like the other planets in the Solar System, Earth orbits more or less around the Sun’s equator. So, too, has most of our solar instruments. This means that we’ve never had a clear view of the top and bottom of our star.

It’s a problem for many reasons, not least of which is that, every 11 years, those poles flip, and north and south polarity reverses. We don’t have a good handle on why this process happens. A good, clear view of the poles would give a lot of new information that scientists could use to help figure it out.

Solar Orbiter has just made the best effort yet to obtain that clear view. It’s the perfect timing for this observation, too: the Sun is emerging from solar maximum, the period during which that polar flip takes place. In February 2025, the spacecraft, usually zipping around the Sun’s middle, tilted its orbit by 17 degrees – enough to finally see the pole.

Previous orbiters had only ever tilted their orbits as far as 7 degrees, with the exception of the Ulysses orbiter that, alas, carried no imaging equipment as it made three exciting loops directly over the Sun’s poles between 1994 and 2008.

“We did not know what precisely to be expecting from those first observations,” says astrophysicist Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System analysis in Germany. “The Sun’s poles are actually terra incognita.”

Three imaging tools took detailed readings of the photo voltaic south pole over the times’ price of observations:

• The Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) probed the magnetic fields of the Sun as manifested by way of the polarization of its mild;
• the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) took observations within the specified wavelengths to seize nice buildings within the photo voltaic environment;
• and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) software captures observations in ultraviolet and excessive ultraviolet to probe the temperature and composition of the photo voltaic corona.

The magnetic box on the south pole was once somewhat of an interesting mess throughout Solar Orbiter’s remark duration, with a mix of each north and south polarities.

As the polar turn settles down, one polarity will reinforce and the opposite wane, all of the solution to photo voltaic minimal, when the magnetic box will probably be at its maximum orderly ahead of beginning to fray once more.

Meanwhile, SPICE tracked the movement of carbon ions within the area of the photo voltaic corona referred to as the transition area, the place the temperature unexpectedly spikes by way of hundreds of levels. The radiance map finds how the ions are allotted, whilst the doppler map presentations how briskly the ions had been shifting clear of or in opposition to Solar Orbiter on the time of remark.

How debris transfer round within the photo voltaic environment is an important to working out the photo voltaic wind – the consistent flow of charged debris that blows from the Sun out into the Solar System.

In simply a little while, the spacecraft captured sufficient information to stay photo voltaic scientists busy for future years. That information, alternatively, is only the start. Solar Orbiter goes to proceed orbiting the Sun at a 17-degree tilt till December 2026, when it’ll kick issues up a notch to 24 levels. It will then ramp as much as 33 levels in June 2029.

“This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter’s ‘stairway to heaven’,” says ESA astronomer Daniel Müller.

“In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the Sun’s polar regions. These data will transform our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity.”