People have been studying the Sun for more than 400 years, starting when early astronomers first used telescopes to spot features like sunspots. Galileo Galilei was one of the earliest to document these dark spots, challenging the long-held idea that the Sun was a perfect, unchanging ball. His groundbreaking work marked the beginning of solar science and opened the door to understanding our closest star’s complex behavior, with the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter continuing that mission of discovery.
Galileo’s legacy in solar research
Since Galileo’s time, technology has advanced enough to track the Sun’s roughly 11-year cycle and to study phenomena like solar flares, prominences, and the solar wind in greater detail. Still, some parts of the Sun stayed out of reach — mainly its poles. Observing them has been tricky because of the limited angles available from Earth and nearby spacecraft.
Filling in the gaps with new missions, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter was designed to get closer to the Sun and change its viewing angle beyond Earth’s orbital plane. This allowed it to capture never-before-seen images of the Sun’s poles, just as the Sun approaches the peak of its activity cycle. These fresh views bring valuable data that could change how we understand solar behavior, continuing the kind of curiosity Galileo first sparked centuries ago.
First-ever close look at the Sun’s poles
For the first time, scientists can directly observe the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane, revealing new and surprising magnetic and structural details. To get there, Solar Orbiter tilted its orbit out of the ecliptic plane, reaching a viewing angle of 17 degrees below the Sun’s equator by March 2025. Earlier in that campaign, it captured its first high-angle observations at 15 degrees below the solar equator, offering rare views of the southern pole, a turbulent magnetic world.
The images showed the Sun’s south pole is a place of intense magnetic activity. Instruments on board — like PHI, which maps magnetic fields on the surface, and EUI and SPICE, which look at the upper atmosphere including the corona — collected data revealing how magnetic activity generates charged particles flowing into space. These findings would’ve given Galileo a completely new lens into the object he once watched through his telescope.
A constantly changing magnetic field
Unlike Earth’s mostly steady magnetic field, the Sun’s magnetic zones are always shifting. These smaller, active regions around sunspots and poles help shape the Sun’s overall magnetic field. For most of the 11-year cycle, this field looks like a giant bar magnet. But near the solar maximum — the most active period — the field flips, swapping its north and south poles. Thanks to Solar Orbiter’s unique view, scientists are watching this flip happen for the first time — another major leap forward from the observations Galileo made in the 1600s.
Solar Orbiter has also captured new images showing how different chemical elements move through the Sun’s layers. This was with SPICE, which detects specific frequencies of light — known as spectral lines — that elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon, and magnesium emit at certain temperatures.
What the research means for us
For the first time, the SPICE team tracked these spectral lines to measure how fast chunks of solar material are moving. These measurements help reveal how particles get flung off the Sun as solar wind. Understanding solar wind and eruptions better will help scientists understand how bursts might affect life on Earth. In case of a sudden burst, satellites might be affected, and daily life would be changed considerably. Internet, GPS, communication: everything can fail — underscoring why predicting the Sun’s behavior matters more than ever.