Mingde Ding

The solar corona lives its own turbulent life. Magnetic fields here are governed by the motions of the dense surface — the Sun's photosphere — but occasionally they rewrite the magnetic pattern themselves.

The Sun's edge looks like a fuzzy fringe: thin jets of hot gas, spicules, shoot upward from it. They live only a few minutes and are constantly changing. In 2024, a balloon-borne telescope managed to spot not only the jets themselves but also their faint glow in hydrogen lines that had never been captured there before.