VIDEO. "It's truly incredible," NASA reveals unprecedented images of the Sun

"We've been waiting for this moment since the late 1950s," says Nour Rawafi, chief scientist of the Parker mission. Other space probes had already studied the Sun before, but at a much greater distance. Launched in 2018, the mission was named in honor of American astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who first described the phenomenon of solar winds, continuous streams of particles from the Sun, in 1958.

The Parker probe recently entered its final orbit, which brought it to within about 6.1 million kilometers of the Sun's surface. This closeness record was first achieved on Christmas Eve 2024 and has been repeated twice since, in March and June, on an 88-day cycle. To give an idea of the magnitude of the matter, if the distance between Earth and the Sun were one kilometer, Parker would be only about 40 meters from our star. The spacecraft's single camera, the Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR), captured images as Parker explored the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere, called the corona.

Edited into a short video lasting a few seconds, these new images reveal for the first time in high resolution coronal mass ejections (CMEs), immense showers of ionized particles that play a role in the appearance of space weather phenomena. These eruptions are notably at the origin of the spectacular aurora borealis visible across much of the world last May. “We have several CMEs stacked on top of each other, that’s what makes them so unique,” explains Nour Rawafi. “It’s really incredible to see this dynamic at work.”

Another striking detail: the solar wind, visible in the images as a flow coming from the left, follows a structure called the heliospheric current sheet, an invisible boundary where the Sun's magnetic field shifts from north to south. This is crucial to study because it plays a key role in the propagation of solar flares and their potential impact on Earth. Space weather can have serious consequences: it can overload power grids, disrupt communications, and damage satellites.

With thousands of additional satellites expected to enter orbit in the coming years, tracking them and preventing collisions is becoming increasingly complex, especially during solar disturbances, which can slightly shift their trajectory. Rawafi is particularly enthusiastic about what's to come, as the Sun is now heading toward the minimum of its activity cycle, expected in five to six years. Some of the most extreme solar storms have occurred during this descending phase, such as the famous "Halloween storms" of 2003, which forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take extra precautions against radiation.