The Sneaky Force Behind Our Sun’s Violent Outbursts

Many of the mysteries of our sun are not buried at its core, as we might expect. They are dancing ferociously on its surface. Plasma leaps out, arcing millions of miles into space before plunging back to return to its fiery home. Massive solar flares shoot deadly X-ray radiation into the solar system. And coronal mass ejections loft chunks of the sun’s own body into space, creating storms of energy that can wreak havoc on the planets in our solar system.

For millennia, astronomers marveled at the displays, puzzling over what might be causing them. But marvel was about all they could do. The shows of force could usually only be glimpsed, briefly, during a total solar eclipse, when the moon blocked the body of the sun and the sun’s corona—its outermost atmosphere—and wild prominences became visible. 

Now, however, scientists have sealed the wax on their proverbial wings and are flying ever-so-close to the sun, able to witness its atmosphere and study it directly in all its fiery glory.

The Parker Solar Probe had to take an Icarian risk.

After launching in 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probeto the sun’s chaos. Joined by the ESA’s Solar Orbiter, which launched in 2020, the bold pair have been beaming back astonishing evidence about what is driving the sun’s high-energy fury. The results suggest that it is not plumes of combusting fire or the violent strikes of meteors, as earlier astronomers had once suggested, but more likely a humble, unassuming, usually ignored force in the universe: magnetic fields.