Humanity takes its 1st look at the sun's poles: 'This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's stairway to heaven' (images)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
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.
Related Stories:
— The sun's magnetic field will flip soon. Here's what to expect
— How the Sun's Magnetic Field Works
— Magnetic fields appear to be as old as the universe itself. What created them?
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."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
7 hours ago
- Forbes
ESA's Solar Orbiter Should Solve Mystery Of Sun's Outermost Atmosphere
ESA's Solar Orbiter mission will face the Sun from within the orbit of Mercury at its closest ... More approach. The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter mission recently stunned the world with the first-ever full images of our Sun's South pole, proving that this was going to be a mission like no other. Using an orbital gravity assist from the planet Venus, the Solar Orbiter mission spacecraft was able to maneuver into an orbit that has taken it to an angle 17 degrees below the Sun's equator. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come, says ESA. The 1.2-billion-euro Solar Orbiter mission, with NASA participation, should finally help us understand the origin of the Sun's solar winds as well as our understanding of the Sun's poles. And arguably most importantly, it should solve the puzzle of why our star's outermost atmosphere, or corona, is heated to millions of degrees Kelvin and is thus so much hotter than the Sun's own surface. By contrast, our Sun's visible photosphere, or surface, averages only 5,500 degrees K. With Solar Orbiter, we are clearly seeing energy releases on the nano-flare scale, Daniel Mueller, a solar physicist and ESA project scientist for both ESA's SOHO and Solar Orbiter missions to the Sun, tells me in his office in The Netherlands. But the question is, would these nano-flares continue like that infinitely, or is there a certain lower limit to the production of these nano-flares, Mueller wonders. The puzzle is whether these nano-flares are enough to heat up the Sun's corona to the temperatures with which it is routinely measured. A Unique View Launched in 2020, from its highly elliptical orbit just inside Mercury's perihelion, the closest point in our innermost planet's solar orbit, the ESA spacecraft offers the best views yet of our own yellow dwarf star. We can see on scales down to about 200 kilometers on the Sun, which shows us a lot of dynamics of our star, says Mueller. And thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun's poles from outside the ecliptic plane (the imaginary geometric plane in which our Earth orbits the Sun), says ESA. We observed the Sun's North pole at the end of this past April, says Mueller. But we passed the Southern pole first and then the Northern pole six weeks later, he says. At the moment, as seen from Earth, the Solar Orbiter is almost behind the Sun, so the data downlink has slowed to a trickle. But by early October, Mueller expects to have downloaded all the data from Solar Orbiter's Spring polar observations of the Sun. And within a matter of two to three months after the data is on the ground, the first scientific results will have been written up and submitted to journals for publication, says Mueller. These observations are also key to understanding the Sun's magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity, says ESA. The spacecraft's instruments show that the Sun's South pole is a bit of a magnetic mess now, with both North and South polarity magnetic fields present, ESA notes. Ready To Flip Right now, there is not a clear dominant magnetic polarity, but a mix of the two, says Mueller. And that is exactly what you would expect to find during the maximum of the Sun's activity cycle, when the magnetic field is about to flip, he says. The real applications are for space weather predictions. Case in point, better space weather forecasting may have saved many of Elon Musk's 523 Starlink satellites that reentered Earth's atmosphere between 2020 and 2024. This period coincides with the rising phase of solar cycle 25, which has shown itself to be more intense than the previous solar cycle, the authors of a 2025 paper appearing in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences write. Our results indisputably show that satellites reenter faster with higher geomagnetic activity, the authors note. There was a big solar storm that caused the earth's upper Earth atmosphere to expand, so, the satellites experienced more drag, and therefore didn't make it to orbit, says Mueller. One option may have been simply to hold off on launches until this increased period of solar activity enabled a less risky geomagnetic environment in Earth's upper atmosphere. The hope is that the Solar Orbiter mission and other missions like it will lead to better and more reliable space weather predictions that could potentially save hundreds of millions of dollars in the commercial satellite industry. Solar Orbiter should do its share in solving both pure solar physics conundrums as well as in more practical applications like space weather. The good news is that the spacecraft still has plenty of fuel left. Our current funding goes until the end of 2026, but because we had a picture-perfect launch provided by United Launch Alliance and NASA, we saved a lot of fuel, says Mueller. So, the onboard fuel reserves are so large that we can keep going for a long time, he says.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Just 1 dose of magic mushroom compound eases depression for at least 5 years in most patients, small study suggests
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. DENVER—Psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, can alleviate depression for at least five years after a single dose, a new study finds. The research, presented June 18 at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference in Denver, focused on patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), which is often called clinical depression. The serious mood disorder causes a persistent feeling of sadness and a loss of interest or pleasure in activities that were once enjoyable. The most common treatments for MDD include talk therapy and medications such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and both can take a long time to show any benefits. When early studies hinted at psilocybin's potential as an antidepressant, a team of researchers undertook the first-ever randomized clinical trial to explore the use of the psychedelic for treating severe depression. The trial included 24 patients, half of whom received psilocybin at the very start of the trial and half of whom received the same dose eight weeks later—the "waitlist" group. Each patient also received 11 hours of psychotherapy. Even in that short time frame, "there was a significant reduction in depression in the immediate-treatment group compared to those on the waitlist," study co-author Alan Davis, director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at The Ohio State University, told Live Science. Once all of the patients had completed the four-week study, the psilocybin appeared to be four times more effective than traditional antidepressant medications, based on previous research data. One month after the treatment, 17 patients had relieved symptoms, including 14 who were in full remission from depression. Patients also responded much faster to psilocybin than is typical for conventional antidepressants. But do these benefits of psilocybin last? Related: Magic mushrooms temporarily 'dissolve' brain network responsible for sense of self Very few long-term studies of psilocybin for depression have been conducted to date, said Dr. Charles Raison, a professor of human ecology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research. "They are very difficult to do because people drop out," Raison told Live Science in an email. "But also because they go on all sorts of other treatments that obfuscate the degree to which any longer lasting benefits result from the psychedelic or because the participant got therapy or restarted an antidepressant." To investigate whether the benefits for psilocybin lasted and if the patients had experienced any side effects, the researchers contacted the original trial participants several years later to request their enrollment in a follow-up study. Twenty-one patients enrolled, and their clinicians rated any changes in the participants' levels of depression from before the original treatment to the present day. The patients also filled out a series of self-reported, online questionnaires and met up with clinicians to document their ability to engage in everyday tasks, their levels of anxiety and their general mental health. The researchers assumed that the three patients that didn't sign up for the follow up, and the three that didn't complete the questionnaires had not remained in remission. Even so, the researchers found that 67% of the participants who had suffered from depression half a decade earlier remained in remission after a single psychedelic therapy session. These patients also reported less anxiety and less difficulty functioning on a daily basis. In general, the two-thirds of the patients who responded well reported lasting positive changes in their mindsets, emotional health and relationships. "I'm excited by these deeper aspects of their lives that really speaks to the importance of these interventions beyond just reduction of depression," Davis said. RELATED STORIES —Psychedelics rapidly change the brain. Here's how. —Australia clears legal use of MDMA and psilocybin to treat PTSD and depression —'Magic mushroom' treatment for depression inches closer to approval Most of the patients shared that, following the original treatment, they'd engaged in self-reflection and therapy to help understand themselves and navigate life's challenges. Davis hypothesizes that the psychedelic experience catalyzes a deeper therapy process and would like to conduct future studies comparing the relative influences of psilocybin and psychotherapy in alleviating depression. "The biggest caveat of this study is the small sample size, and the fact that the original trial showed larger antidepressant effects than subsequent larger multi-site studies seem to be showing," Raison said. In a multi-site clinical trial with 233 participants, 37% of the 79 who received a single 25 mg dose of psilocybin, coupled with psychotherapy, went into remission from major depression. While these trials report less widespread antidepressant effects, they support the idea that psilocybin can effectively treat depression, Davis said, and he is keen to see how the findings of multi-site trials hold up five years post-treatment.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Vera C. Rubin debut images: How to see the groundbreaking space photos from the world's largest camera
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to release its debut images — taken with the largest digital camera ever built — on Monday (Jun. 23). The world-first images and videos will be ultra-high-definition and will show off the observatory's highly anticipated, cutting-edge capabilities for the first time. Here's what you need to know. If you want to watch from home, a news conference will be streaming on YouTube in English and Spanish at 11:00 a.m. EDT on Monday. The link to watch is posted on the observatory's website, and is also embedded here. If you'd prefer to bask in the awe of the cosmos with friends, you may be able to attend a watch party near you — or even host one of your own. Groups will gather across the globe in planetariums and universities to admire the highly detailed images and videos as they are released. The observatory has shared links to a map of all registered watch parties, as well as a link to sign up to become a host. During the news conference, the observatory team will introduce the Rubin Observatory before showcasing the new images and discussing their significance. Watch parties may also hear from local scientists and special guests. Be sure to check out the details of a watch party before you attend to learn about any extra programming. The observatory, perched high on a mountain in the Chilean Andes, will peer at interstellar comets and dangerous asteroids, as well as larger objects, like twisting galaxies and exploding supernovas. Related: 'People thought this couldn't be done': Scientists observe light of 'cosmic dawn' with a telescope on Earth for the first time ever Inside Rubin lies the world's largest digital camera and six of the largest optical filters ever produced. Together, they allow researchers to observe different facets of the universe in many wavelengths of light and remarkably high detail. The camera will take a new high-resolution photo of the sky around every 40 seconds. The images will then be transmitted via fiber optic cables to a supercomputer in California, which will analyze the photos. When stitched together, the images can act as a time-lapse video of space, one that is planned to span 10 years. RELATED STORIES —Space photo of the week: Observatory, or alien planet? Boggle your mind with this 360-degree image —Vera C. Rubin Observatory: The groundbreaking mission to make a 10-year, time-lapse movie of the universe —3,200-megapixel camera of the future Vera Rubin Observatory snaps record-breaking 1st photos Using its groundbreaking instruments, the observatory is expected to contribute to current understanding of widely debated phenomena, including dark energy and dark matter — two components that are thought to make up a vast majority of the universe, but remain poorly understood. The new images could be the first of many that vastly improve our understanding of the cosmos. Whether you join a watch party or tune in from the comfort of your couch, these photos are not to be missed.
