Scientists have captured some of the most detailed images ever of the sun’s surface and outer atmosphere, showing incredible features like “solar rain,” plasma streams, and huge arches of gas. These stunning views were made possible by a ground-based telescope in California, using new technology to remove the blur caused by Earth’s atmosphere.
One of the most fascinating sights is coronal rain — a process where hot solar plasma cools down, forms droplets, and falls back to the sun’s surface along invisible magnetic field lines. These “raindrops” are part of the sun’s dynamic and extreme environment.
The images also show solar prominences — large loops and arches of gas extending from the sun’s surface — and fine plasma streams, all appearing in bright pink due to the hydrogen-alpha light captured by the telescope.
These findings were published in the journal Nature by researchers from the National Solar Observatory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Co-author Vasyl Yurchyshyn said the team had observed features “not previously seen,” and it’s still unclear what some of them are.
The images were taken using the 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory. The telescope now includes a cutting-edge system called Cona, which acts like an advanced autofocus for the sky. Using a laser and a flexible mirror that adjusts 2,200 times per second, it corrects for the atmosphere’s distortions in real time.
This advancement allows scientists to see features as small as 63 kilometers across — a huge improvement over the previous limit of 1,000 kilometers. These detailed views are especially important for studying the sun’s corona, the outermost layer of its atmosphere, which is much hotter than the surface and responsible for the solar wind that affects Earth’s space weather.
Following the success of this technology, scientists plan to install Cona on the world’s largest solar telescope — the 4-meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii — for even clearer views of our star in the future.
