Solar Orbiter catches the sun's missing high-speed vibrations

The sun's magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever-changing mess. In particular, our star's polar regions host areas called polar coronal holes, which contain invisible magnetic highways that stretch into interplanetary space.

Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Add as preferred source National Science Review (2026). Images from the EUI of the Solar Orbiter show the fine plumes and "transverse" wave motion in the upper atmosphere of the sun.

Credit: National Science Review (2026). Yuhang Gao and Professor Hui Tian at Peking University, published recently in the journal National Science Review, suggests they might have found an answer by using high-speed images from the Solar Orbiter to detect never-before-seen rapid, high-frequency magnetic waves in those.

Older instruments, such as NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), took pictures every 12 seconds and had a spatial resolution of around 1, 100 km for every pixel. Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) captures an image every five seconds, with details down to 420 km per pixel, more than double the precision and twice the speed of earlier instruments.

Using data from both instruments from September 2021, the authors subjected the data to an automated magnetic wave-tracking program called the Northumbria University Wave Tracking (NUWT). Taking a close look at solar plumes, ray-like magnetic structures that stick out from the sun's north pole, the authors noted a distinct difference in the number of waves detected by the two observatories.

With the SDO, the algorithm caught 560 wave events, whereas with the EUI, it caught 2, 318, more than four times as many.

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