Embargo: Wednesday 05 August 2026 | 16:00 (BST)

The highest-resolution images ever captured of the sun’s visible surface have revealed remarkable new details about the dynamic processes shaping our nearest star. Published today in Nature , the research provides scientists with an unprecedented look at the sun’s photosphere, revealing intricate structures and new insights into how solar magnetic fields behave. The spectacular new images come from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope — the world’s most powerful solar telescope — in Hawaii, which saw “first light” in 2019. The researchers observed a magnetically active region near a sunspot at an entirely new level of detail, creating time-sequenced images that show the sun’s surface as a constantly shifting landscape dominated by striking band-like and vortex-like patterns.

New View Of The Sun’s Surface

The sun’s photosphere is its bright surface, which is so bright that we can’t safely look at it. It’s where hot plasma — gas that has been heated so intensely that electrons are separated from their atoms — becomes transparent, allowing visible light to escape into space. Although astronomers have long known powerful magnetic fields and convection currents shape this region, the latest observations reveal a far more complex environment than previously understood. The researchers identified two layers of fluid moving past one another at different speeds, producing ripple-like waves and vortices, as well as band-like and vortex-like structures for the first time.

Why These Images Are Important

How plasma behaves in highly magnetized environments is cutting-edge science. The discovery offers new insight into how magnetic fields behave in the sun and, by extension, many other stars. Improving scientists’ understanding of these magnetic processes could help refine models of solar activity and the behavior of plasma in highly magnetized environments.

Above the sun’s photosphere is its corona, a far hotter but fainter atmospheric layer where the solar wind flows from. It only becomes visible during a total solar eclipse. That next happens on Aug. 12, when those in the moon’s central shadow that day — called the path of totality — will see the corona with their naked eye for a few minutes. The total eclipse will be visible in Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal. The longest duration of totality will be about 2 minutes and 18 seconds, off the western coast of Iceland.

Predicting What The Sun’s Corona Will Look Like

But what will the corona look like during totality? That’s the job of Predictive Science, which has just published its latest forecast of the shape of the solar corona — which can drastically vary from eclipse to eclipse. It will likely resemble the corona at solar maximum — the peak of the sun’s 11-year cycle — which occurred in late 2024. “The corona is still very maximum-like with many streamers around the sun,” said Jon Linker at Predictive Science Inc., by email. “But it now has well-defined polar coronal holes, as would be expected in the early declining phase of the cycle.”

“It’s sunspots specifically near the edge of the sun that dictate what the corona will look like,” said Dr. Ryan French , solar physicist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado and author of Little Book of Eclipses , in an interview. “The Predictive Science model changes because new sunspots pass into view as the sun rotates.”

A ‘Golden Age’ For Solar Physics

This year’s prediction will benefit from data from Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft that has been orbiting—and studying—the sun since 2020. Right now, the spacecraft is on the far side of the sun, so it is sending back data solar physicists have never had before during a total solar eclipse. As eclipse chasers and astronomers look at and photograph the solar corona on Aug. 12, they will do so with an unprecedented second point of view available from Solar Orbiter.

With Solar Orbiter, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, solar physics is living through a golden age where a complete picture of how the sun’s magnetic field, atmosphere and space weather behave is within reach — but we’re not there yet.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.