These images reveal fine threads of cooling plasma<\/a>, twisting arcs called prominence structures, and a narrow, short lived plasmoid that unraveled in the wake of a flare. <\/p>\n The footage is not a special eclipse trick, it is routine observing from a ground telescope that now corrects Earth\u2019s air in real time.<\/p>\n Why the Sun\u2019s corona matters<\/p>\n Lead scientist Dirk Schmidt<\/a> of the U.S. National Science Foundation\u2019s National Solar Observatory<\/a> led development on the Goode Solar Telescope at Big Bear, with collaborators at New Jersey Institute of Technology\u2019s Center for Solar Terrestrial Research (CSTR<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n Clearer views at small scales help answer long standing questions about why the corona is millions of degrees while the surface below is about 10,000 degrees, a puzzle known as the coronal heating problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n Spacecraft imagers like the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA\u2019s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO-AIA<\/a>) catch the full disk with 1.5 arcsecond resolution and 12 second cadence<\/a>, but they do not reach the fine angular resolution a large ground telescope can achieve with good correction. <\/p>\n The new approach narrows the gap and exposes the tiny strands and clumps that models of loop heating and cooling have hinted at for years.<\/p>\n New optics beat the blur<\/p>\n \u201cThe turbulence in the air severely degrades images of objects in space, like our sun<\/a>, seen through our telescopes. But we can correct for that,\u201d said Schmidt. <\/p>\n The Coronal Adaptive Optics system (CONA) reshapes a mirror about 2,200 times per second and uses a specialized sensor tuned to hydrogen-alpha light to lock onto off limb features that older systems could not stabilize.\u00a0<\/p>\n Older solar adaptive optics worked best on the bright disk, yet lost their grip beyond the edge where the corona glows faintly. <\/p>\n CONA was built to track dim coronal structure directly, so the correction follows the exact region of interest instead of a nearby proxy, which keeps the scene stable for fast imaging bursts.<\/p>\n At the telescope\u2019s diffraction limit near one tenth of an arcsecond, the team resolved strands under 100 kilometers wide and captured a finely twisted plasmoid that formed and collapsed during the decay phase of a modest flare. <\/p>\n Those behaviors point to rapid changes in magnetic topology known as magnetic reconnection, a process that can spawn small islands and kinks as energy is released in bursts.<\/p>\n What the Sun\u2019s coronal rain reveals<\/p>\n The instrument\u2019s sharpness turned coronal rain from a blur into a structured pattern, with many strands clustering near the telescope\u2019s resolution limit and others appearing even narrower in the raw profiles. <\/p>\n That is important because rain offers a direct marker of how and where energy is deposited along coronal loops, and models predict a wide range of sizes and cooling times tied to the heating pattern.<\/p>\n \u201cRaindrops in the sun<\/a>\u2019s corona can be narrower than 20 kilometers,\u201d concluded Thomas Schad<\/a>, NSO astronomer on the observing team, from the most detailed images of coronal rain to date. <\/p>\n Rain forms when hot loop plasma becomes thermally unstable and condenses, a multiphase process that has been linked to the balance between heating and cooling in simulations and observations of active regions.<\/p>\n During one observing run, the team watched a narrow, fast evolving plasmoid<\/a> appear near the apex of post flare loops and then unravel into fragments within minutes, an event that would have looked bland at lower resolution and cadence. <\/p>\n The feature\u2019s fine threads and abrupt halt suggest a tug of war between tension and pressure that accompanies reconnection and kink like behavior in the surrounding field, classic magnetohydrodynamics at work.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are by far the most detailed observations of this kind, showing features not previously observed, and it\u2019s not quite clear what they are,\u201d said Vasyl Yurchyshyn<\/a>, NJIT CSTR research professor and co-author of the study. <\/p>\n That uncertainty is useful, it points directly to the scales where models must improve and where future spectroscopic measurements can pin down temperatures and flows.<\/p>\n Sun\u2019s corona and new telescopes<\/p>\n CONA now runs at the Goode<\/a> Solar Telescope in California, and the team is preparing to bring the technique to the 4 meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope<\/a> in Hawai\u2018i, which would push the smallest observable scales even further. <\/p>\n Pairing high resolution imaging with polarimetry at that aperture would open the door to routine measurements of coronal magnetic fields and their rapid changes.<\/p>\n A move to larger apertures also raises the bar for speed, because features can evolve significantly in fractions of a second. <\/p>\n That is a tradeoff the field is ready to make now that coronal adaptive optics is turning ultra fine structures from theory into everyday data.<\/p>\n The study is published in Nature Astronomy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.\u00a0<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new way of steadying telescopes has lifted the blur on the sun\u2019s corona, giving scientists crisp, movie-like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-85414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Examples](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/sun_coronal-rain_Quiescent-hedgerow-prominence_Nature-Astronomy_1s.webp.webp\")
<\/a>Examples of diverse H\u03b1 features outside the solar disk imaged with adaptive optics correction. Click image to enlarge. Credit: Nature AstronomySurprise twist in a flare\u2019s wake<\/p>\n