 |
| Parker Probe captures the Sun’s turbulent plasma. |
They did it again — the Sun up close and laid bare. This week, NASA published what it called the closest, clearest pictures taken from inside the Sun’s outer atmosphere. The images are not art made by a filter. They are raw, stitched views and short movies that show plasma, knots of magnetic field, and coronal mass ejections in motion, seen from a point no spacecraft has ever reached before.
The pictures came from Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR camera. The probe skimmed the corona — the Sun’s hot outer skin — at about 3.8 million miles from the visible surface. That flight path, made late last year, let WISPR watch how solar wind and big eruptions start and move, up close. Scientists say the pictures show CMEs piling up and colliding, and they show the switchbacks — sudden kinks in the solar magnetic field — where the wind forms. Those are the things that drive space weather out to Earth.
What you see in the new frames is motion, not just a pretty picture. WISPR’s movie clips show the corona flowing outward and blobs of plasma being swept away like dust in a wind. In one sequence, two big eruptions run into each other. That kind of collision can speed particles and change where a cloud of charged gas ends up — useful data for anyone who wants better space-weather forecasts. Scientists are already using these images alongside instruments that measure particles and fields to map what happens right after material leaves the Sun.
This NASA release is one part of a bigger push in solar imaging. Around the same stretch of months, ground and space observatories have been dropping images that experts call the “sharpest-ever” for different layers of the Sun. On the ground, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope — the huge four-meter scope on Maui — produced the tiniest, crispest view of the Sun’s visible surface. That image shows narrow bright and dark stripes only about 20 kilometers wide, rippling across the photosphere. Scientists say those tiny patterns trace magnetic curtains and could hold the key to how energy moves upward into the corona.
Then there’s Solar Orbiter, the joint ESA-NASA mission that stitched together hundreds of ultraviolet frames to make a very wide, very sharp map of the Sun. That mosaic gives a wide-angle but detailed look at active regions and the bright loops that arch over them. The result is a single high-resolution picture made from some 200 individual images, letting teams cross-check fine features against Parker’s close-in snapshots and DKIST’s surface detail.
So we’ve got several “best-ever” claims, each true in its own lane. Parker has the closest-ever views of the corona from inside the Sun’s atmosphere. DKIST has the highest spatial resolution on the surface, revealing features down to a few dozen kilometers. Solar Orbiter gives the widest high-resolution UV mapping of the disc and surrounding atmosphere. Each data set fills in a different part of the puzzle.
Why that matters is not just bragging rights. The Sun is a layered machine. Stuff that happens on the visible surface can nudge the magnetic field above it. Those fields guide plasma and particle flows. When loops snap or when giant eruptions erupt, they can dump energy and charged particles into space. Those particles can rattle satellites, foul radio links, and even induce currents in electric grids on Earth. Better pictures let scientists link what happens where, and when, and that improves models that try to predict fallout from solar storms.
Technically, the new Parker views came from a flyby in late December 2024. The probe’s WISPR camera recorded fields and moving structures as the spacecraft cut through the outskirts of the corona. The images were processed into short movies and still frames, and NASA released them with supporting analysis about how CMEs and the heliospheric current sheet behaved during that pass. The release noted that these close-in pictures let researchers see interactions previously hidden from far-off observatories.
On the ground, Inouye’s images are the product of a large mirror and cutting-edge adaptive optics. That allowed the team to tease out tiny stripes and bright specks inside the boiling granules that mark the Sun’s convective engine. The images show how magnetic fields thread the photosphere and hint at processes that might send energy into the corona. Scientists published the results in a peer-reviewed journal and highlighted the 20-kilometer scale of the fine features.
Meanwhile, Solar Orbiter’s wide mosaic was assembled from many ultraviolet frames taken by its EUI instrument. That instrument highlights hot plasma and loop structures that glow in extreme ultraviolet light. The composite image spans the whole disk and parts of the atmosphere, letting teams compare large-scale features with high detail. The finished product is a 12,544-by-12,544-pixel mosaic made from many shots, which helps researchers see how local eruptions connect to global patterns.
Other new missions are joining the picture. NASA’s PUNCH mission — a cluster of small spacecraft designed to map the corona and solar wind as it streams outward — has now released early images of big eruptions in the corona. Those views, taken with a blocked-out Sun to expose the faint outer atmosphere, will pair with Parker and Solar Orbiter data to track particles as they move into interplanetary space. In short, the community is building a layered view from the surface to well past Earth orbit.
There are limits, of course. Ground scopes like DKIST have to fight Earth’s air, and even with adaptive optics they only see the visible surface and low atmosphere. Spacecraft see other bands and other layers but from different angles and distances. Images are processed, cropped, and often combined, and teams make that clear — some early DKIST products were repaired and enhanced to bring out tiny features while full calibration continued. That is normal in big imaging projects; raw telemetry must be handled before it becomes a science-ready product.
Still, the science payoff is immediate. Parker’s close views show where switchbacks and the slow and fast solar wind forms, and how CMEs can interact and speed up. DKIST’s surface maps show the magnetic knots that may seed coronal heating. Solar Orbiter documents the UV-lit loops and large active regions that launch the storms. PUNCH will follow the clouds outward. Together, this is a rare, almost live way to see cause and effect on our closest star.
For the public, the images are visceral. The Sun — a ball we only ever saw as a disk before — now looks like weather. You can see strands, curtains, bubbles, and flows. That makes the Sun both more familiar and more mysterious. Scientists are already mining the frames for numbers: particle speeds, field orientations, tiny-scale magnetic strengths, and the rhythm of eruptions across time. Those numbers will feed models that aim to forecast storms before they reach Earth.
NASA also flagged the next steps. Parker Solar Probe will make more close passes, and the mission calendar lists another near-Sun approach on Sept. 15, 2025. Between more WISPR frames, continued DKIST observing, Solar Orbiter mosaics, and PUNCH’s expanding data, researchers expect a steady stream of new, sharper, and more telling views in the months ahead.