Humanity takes its 1st look at the sun's poles: 'This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's stairway to heaven' (images)

Yahoo

11-06-2025

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The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has captured humanity's first-ever images of the sun's poles.
If this doesn't seem like a big deal, consider that every image you have ever seen of the sun was taken from around our star's equator. That is because Earth, the other solar system planets, and all other modern spacecraft orbit the sun in a flat disc around it called the "ecliptic plane."
This European Space Agency (ESA) sun-orbiting mission has done things a little differently, however, tilting its orbit out of that plane. This allowed the Solar Orbiter to image the sun from a whole new angle and in an entirely new way.
The captured images of the solar south pole were taken between March 16 and 17, 2025, with the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments. They constitute humanity's first ever look at the sun's poles.
This was the Solar Orbiter mission's first high-angle observation campaign of the sun, conducted at an angle of 15 degrees below the solar equator. Just a few days after snapping these images, the ESA spacecraft reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees, which it sits in currently as it performs its first "pole-to-pole" orbit of our star.
"Spacecraft normally orbit the sun on the flat disc called the ecliptic plane, just like most of the planets in our solar system. This is the most energy-efficient way to launch and maintain orbits," co-principal leader of the Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instrument, Hamish Reid of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London (UCL) said in a statement to Space.com. "These first images of the solar poles are just the start. Over the next few years, there is scope for discovery science. "We are not sure what we will find, and it is likely we will see things that we didn't know about before."
Another ESA/NASA spacecraft, Ulysses, has flown over the poles of the sun, but this spacecraft lacked an imaging instrument, and its passage of our star was also much further away than that of the Solar Orbiter.
The Solar Orbiter is so useful for observing the sun because each of its instruments sees our star in very different ways. The PHI captures solar observations in visible light and is able to map its magnetic field.
Meanwhile, the EUI images our star in ultraviolet light, which allows scientists to study the superheated plasma in the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, which can reach temperatures as great as 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit (around 3 million degrees Celsius). This could help solar scientists determine how the corona can reach temperatures much greater than the sun's surface, the photosphere, despite being much further away from the solar core, where the vast majority of the sun's heat is generated.
The SPICE instrument of the Solar Orbiter, responsible for the bottom row of images in the picture above, is capable of capturing light emitted by plasmas at different temperatures above the surface of the sun. This helps to model the different layers of the solar atmosphere.
Comparing these three different but complementary methods of observing the sun should allow solar scientists to map the flow of material through the outer layers of the sun. This effort could reveal hitherto undiscovered and unexpected patterns of movement, like vortices around the poles of the sun similar to those spotted above the poles of Venus and Saturn.
All that is for the future, so what has this pioneering approach to solar observations revealed thus far?
The main aim of the shift in Solar Orbiter's orbit around the sun is to build a more complete picture of our star's magnetic activity. This could help explain the sun's 11-year cycle that sees its activity increase toward solar maximum before the poles flip and a new cycle begins.
"Being able to observe the poles is vital for understanding how the sun's magnetic field operates on a global scale, leading to an 11-year cycle in the sun's activity," Lucie Green of Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL, who has been working with the Solar Orbiter since 2005, said. "We'll see previously unobserved high-latitude flows that carry magnetic elements to the polar regions, and in doing so sow the fundamental seeds for the next solar cycle."
Indeed, this approach has already revealed things we didn't know about our star's most southern region and its magnetism.
"We didn't know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the sun's poles are literally terra incognita,' Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), said in a statement.
One of the first discoveries made by the Solar Orbiter is the fact that the magnetic fields around the sun's southern poles appear to be, for lack of a better phrase, a complete mess.
While standard magnetic fields have well-defined north and south poles, these new observations reveal that north and south polarities are both found at the sun's southern pole.This seems to happen at solar maximum when the poles of the sun are about to flip. Following this exchange of poles, the fields at the north and south poles will maintain an orderly single polarity during solar minimum until solar maximum during the next 11-year cycle.
"How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective," Solanki said.The Solar Orbiter observations also revealed that while the equator of the sun, where the most sunspots appear, possesses the strongest magnetic fields, those at the poles of our star have a complex and ever-changing structure.
The Solar Orbiter's SPICE instrument provided another first for the ESA spacecraft, allowing scientists to track elements via their unique emissions as they move through the sun.
Tracing the specific spectral lines of elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon, and magnesium, a process called "Doppler measurement," revealed how materials flow through different layers of the sun.
The Solar Orbiter also allowed scientists to measure the speed of carbon atoms as they are ejected from the sun in plumes and jets.
"The Solar Orbite''s new vantage point will give us a fuller view of how solar wind expands to form a vast bubble around the sun and its planets called the heliosphere," Principal Investigator on the Solar Wind Analyser and Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL researcher Chris Owen said in a statement to Space.com. "We will now see this happen in three dimensions, enhancing the single slice we get from observing only in the ecliptic plane."
SPICE team leader, Frédéric Auchère from the University of Paris-Saclay, explained that Doppler measurements of the solar wind flowing from the sun by other sun-orbiting missions have suffered because they could only get a grazing view of the solar poles.
"Measurements from high latitudes, now possible with Solar Orbiter, will be a revolution in solar physics," Auchère added.
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Perhaps the most exciting element of these Solar Orbiter results is the fact that the best is yet to come. This initial data has not yet been fully analyzed, for instance, an image of the solar north pole has been captured but not downloaded yet. Also, data from the ESA mission's first full "pole-to-pole" orbit of the sun, which began in February 2025, will not arrive at Earth until October 2025.
"This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven.' In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the sun's polar regions," ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Müller said. "These data will transform our understanding of the sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."