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Aside from sunlight, the Sun sends out a gusty stream of particles called the solar wind. The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission is the first to capture on camera this wind flying out from the Sun in a twisting, whirling motion. The solar wind particles spiral outwards as if caught in a cyclone that extends millions of kilometres from the Sun.

Solar wind rains down on Earth's atmosphere constantly, but the intensity of this rain depends on solar activity. More than just a space phenomenon, solar wind can disrupt our telecommunication and navigation systems.

Solar Orbiter is on a mission to uncover the origin of the solar wind. It uses six imaging instruments to watch the Sun from closer than any spacecraft before, complemented by in situ instruments to measure the solar wind that flows past the spacecraft.

This video was recorded by the spacecraft's Metis instrument between 12:18 and 20:17 CEST on 12 October 2022. Metis is a coronagraph: it blocks the direct light coming from the Sun's surface to be able to see the much fainter light scattering from charged gas in its outer atmosphere, the corona.

Metis is currently the only instrument able to see the solar wind's twisting dance. No other imaging instrument can see – with a high enough resolution in both space and time – the Sun's inner corona where this dance takes place. (Soon, however, the coronagraph of ESA's Proba-3 mission might be able to see it too!)

The research paper that features this data, ‘Metis observations of Alfvénic outflows driven by interchange reconnection in a pseudostreamer’ by Paolo Romano et al. was published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.

[Technical details: The starting image of the video shows the full view of Solar Orbiter's Metis coronagraph in red, with an image from the spacecraft's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager in the centre (yellow). Zooming to the top left of this view, we see a video derived from Metis observations. The vertical edge of the video spans 1 274 000 km, or 1.83 solar radii. The contrast in the Metis video has been enhanced by using a ‘running difference’ technique: the brightness of each pixel is given by the average pixel brightness of three subsequent frames, minus the average pixel brightness of the three preceding frames. This processing makes background stars appear as horizontal half-dark, half-light lines. Diagonal bright streaks and flashes are caused by light scattering from dust particles close to the coronagraph.] 

Got clear skies this weekend? If clouds cooperate, observers in the North Atlantic and surrounding regions may witness a rare spectacle: a partial solar eclipse. This is the second eclipse of 2025, and bookends the first eclipse season of the year. The season started with March 14th total lunar eclipse. Depending where you are observing from, this is a shallow to a deep partial, ‘almost’ total solar eclipse.

A new 28-minute film explores the medical, social, political and ethical challenges of parenthood and child-rearing that truly permanent communities in space will need to solve.

The focus is all on the Moon at the moment as we strive to establish a permanent lunar base. At the south polar region there are permanently shadowed craters protecting pockets of water ice. Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) has been capturing images of these craters using its ShadowCam instrument. Now, using that data, planetary scientists are using a machine learning algorithm to identify over a billion impact craters in the region, deep inside the shadowed craters and each is at least 16 metres in diameter.

Impatience is an emotion we can all learn to tame

Masaki Kashiwara has won the 2025 Abel prize, seen by some as the Nobel of mathematics, for his contributions to algebraic analysis and representation theory

Masaki Kashiwara has won the 2025 Abel prize, seen by some as the Nobel of mathematics, for his contributions to algebraic analysis and representation theory

The race is under way to make faster, cheaper and better GLP-1 drugs that will go beyond reducing obesity levels to treating some of our most difficult conditions

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have the power to block the forces driving obesity, but the knock-on societal effects may not necessarily be so positive

GLP-1 drugs have revolutionised the treatment of obesity, but the very reason they are effective is also why it's vital to prioritise exercise when taking them

There are many claims about the benefits of microdosing weight-loss drugs, from anti-inflammatory effects to extending longevity. Do any of them stack up?

Anecdotal reports suggest drugs like Ozempic may curb not just appetite but also impulsive or addictive behaviour, hinting at links between metabolic health and our brains

The race is under way to make faster, cheaper and better GLP-1 drugs that will go beyond reducing obesity levels to treating some of our most difficult conditions

There are many claims about the benefits of microdosing weight-loss drugs, from anti-inflammatory effects to extending longevity. Do any of them stack up?

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have the power to block the forces driving obesity, but the knock-on societal effects may not necessarily be so positive

GLP-1 drugs have revolutionised the treatment of obesity, but the very reason they are effective is also why it's vital to prioritise exercise when taking them

There are many claims about the benefits of microdosing weight-loss drugs, from anti-inflammatory effects to extending longevity. Do any of them stack up?

Anecdotal reports suggest drugs like Ozempic may curb not just appetite but also impulsive or addictive behaviour, hinting at links between metabolic health and our brains

Desynchronizing a monkey’s brain with electricity caused a performance boost

Researchers have identified the border between quantum physics and some as-yet-unknown post-quantum realm by mathematically analysing all possible measurements of simple quantum systems