We Just Saw the Bottom of the Sun for the First Time in History

For the first time ever, humanity got a glimpse of the sun’s underbelly.

On March 23, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft tilted its orbit just enough—17° below the solar equator—to capture the first-ever direct images of the sun’s south pole. It might sound like a small shift, but it’s a monumental one. Until now, every image of the sun has come from the same flat angle Earth orbits in, like viewing a spinning disc from the side and calling it a full picture.

But this isn’t just about getting a new selfie angle of our star. These photos—released publicly on June 11—mark a leap forward in solar science. “These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science,” said Carole Mundell, ESA’s Director of Science.

This is What the Bottom of the Sun Looks Like

What they captured was both beautiful and unsettling. The images, collected in visible and ultraviolet light, revealed magnetic fields twisted into dense knots and plasma jets pushing solar material at high speeds. In one layer of the sun’s atmosphere, scientists used Doppler shifts to measure how clumps of carbon ions were moving toward or away from the spacecraft—basically, tracking the speed of solar wind at its source.

One of the biggest discoveries is that the sun’s magnetic field at the south pole is currently a tangle of conflicting polarities. While most magnets have a clear north and south, the sun—true to form—does things its own way. This scattered field suggests we’re smack in the middle of the solar magnetic reversal, which happens roughly every 11 years and signals the sun’s most active and unpredictable phase.

It also means more potential solar flares, more radiation risks for satellites, and more of the beautiful but dangerous space weather that can mess with everything from GPS to airline navigation.

And this is just the start. Solar Orbiter will keep shifting its orbit thanks to gravity assists from Venus, eventually reaching a 33° tilt by 2029. “This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter’s ‘stairway to heaven,’” said ESA scientist Daniel Müller.

Now that we’ve got eyes on the sun’s poles, we’re one step closer to understanding the star that keeps us alive (and occasionally wrecks our power grids).