Astronomers have gotten an unprecedented view of the bottom of the Sun.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency shared images that show, in all its tumultuous glory, our star's secretive south pole.
Captured by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, the stunning achievement has paved the way towards solving some of the Sun's most abiding mysteries, and could even provide us the insight needed to predict some of the star's volatile behavior that can disrupt our modern infrastructure on Earth.
"Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole," said Carole Mundell, the ESA's director of science, in a statement. "These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science."
🌞 See the Sun from a whole new angle. For the first time, our Solar Orbiter mission has captured close-up images of the Sun’s mysterious poles, regions long hidden from our view. In 2025, Solar Orbiter gave us a first-ever look at the Sun’s south pole. Remarkably, it… pic.twitter.com/EhyYxtDyaR — European Space Agency (@esa) June 11, 2025
Our entire existence is centered on the life-giving Sun — but our view of it remains embarrassingly limited. We're only seeing its equator, because, like every planet in the solar system, the Earth is locked into the same unchanging orbit, known as the ecliptic plane, around the star.
To an extent, so are our spacecraft. Breaking free of the ecliptic plane is an immensely fuel-intensive maneuver, and until now, only the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission, which launched in 1990 and ended in 2009, has flown high enough to see the Sun's poles. Unfortunately, it didn't have cameras to capture any images.
To pull off its escape act, the Solar Orbiter performed several flybys past Venus, the second planet from the Sun, to get a gravity assist. Once it built enough speed, the spacecraft hurtled itself out of the ecliptic plane and reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees below the solar equator.
"We didn't know what exactly to expect from these first observations — the Sun's poles are literally terra incognita," Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who leads a scientific team in charge of one Solar Orbiter's onboard instruments, said in the statement.
The orbiter caught the Sun's poles at a bit of an odd moment, however. Right now, the star, as part of its 11-year solar cycle, is nearing the end of its solar maximum, a period of heightened activity in its magnetic field, causing an uptick of its awesome outbursts like solar flares and sunspots.
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