Plate Nº 17 · recorded October 10, 2026
Space & AstronomyReported finding
Balloon Observatory Reveals Hidden Magnetic Threads on the Sun
A balloon-borne telescope flying at 35 km altitude has revealed thin, thread-like magnetic structures in the Sun's atmosphere, offering clues to how the Sun's outer layers get heated.
By Marcus Bennett4 min read762 words
In brief
- Sunrise-III flew at 35 km altitude with a 1-meter telescope during its 2024 flight.
- The study found thin, thread-like magnetic structures in the magnetic canopy above quiet-sun regions.
- Findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2026), DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae909b.
- A numerical simulation linked the threads to magnetic field lines twisted by surface motions.
- SCIP, developed under NAOJ leadership, measured fields from the photosphere through the chromosphere.
A telescope floating 35 kilometers above Earth has revealed unexpectedly fine magnetic structures in the Sun's atmosphere. Researchers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) report thin, thread-like magnetic structures embedded in a layer of the solar atmosphere called the magnetic canopy — a finding published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The observations come from Sunrise-III, a balloon-borne solar observatory that carried a 1-meter (3.3-foot) telescope into the stratosphere during its 2024 flight. Among its instruments was SCIP, the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter, developed under NAOJ's leadership, which can continuously measure magnetic fields from the photosphere up through the chromosphere.
What did Sunrise-III actually see?
The discovery concerns so-called quiet regions of the Sun — areas without sunspots or other visible activity. These regions cover most of the solar surface, yet their magnetic fields are weak and notoriously hard to measure from the ground.
Above these quiet regions sits the magnetic canopy. It forms in the chromosphere, a layer of the solar atmosphere, as magnetic fields concentrated at the solar surface — the photosphere — arc outward with increasing altitude, creating an overarching structure of magnetic arcs.
Scientists had treated this canopy as a relatively simple structure that expands uniformly with height. The new observations overturn that picture. Sunrise-III showed that the canopy contains numerous thin, elongated, thread-like magnetic substructures woven through it.
A numerical simulation performed by the team reproduced these thread-like structures. The simulation showed that the threads are associated with magnetic field lines twisted by motions at the solar surface — in plain terms, the churning gas at the surface tangles the field lines above it into strands.
Why fly a telescope on a balloon?
Earth's atmosphere blurs the view of the Sun for ground-based telescopes, and the weak magnetic fields in quiet-sun regions make detailed measurements especially difficult. Sunrise-III solves this by rising above most of the atmosphere.
A balloon carried the observatory's gondola to an altitude of 35 km (22 miles), where the Sun can be observed with very little atmospheric blurring. At that height, in the stratosphere, the telescope achieves a clarity that ground-based instruments cannot match for these faint signals.
The gondola carried three instruments developed by different countries, making Sunrise-III an international collaborative project. SCIP, the near-infrared spectropolarimeter, proved crucial because it tracks the magnetic field continuously across two atmospheric layers — from the photosphere, the visible surface, up through the chromosphere above it.
These high-precision stratospheric observations made it possible to map the structure of the chromospheric magnetic field above quiet-sun regions in fine detail for the first time.
What about the spicules near the solar limb?
In separate observations, the team pointed Sunrise-III at a quiet region near the solar limb — the visible edge of the Sun. There, the observatory mapped the magnetic fields of spicules, which are jet-like structures that extend upward from the solar surface.
Those measurements revealed how the distribution of the magnetic field varies with height above the limb. Together with the canopy threads, this gives scientists a three-dimensional picture of how magnetic fields are organized in the Sun's lower atmosphere over regions that look bland in ordinary images.
Why does this matter?
The findings carry weight beyond description. The chromosphere is hotter than the solar surface below it, and researchers have long sought to explain how energy travels upward from the surface to heat the solar atmosphere. The intricate magnetic architecture that Sunrise-III uncovered — twisted threads, structured spicule fields, a non-uniform canopy — provides important clues to that energy transport.
Still, the results come from a single balloon flight, and the interpretation relies in part on numerical simulations rather than direct measurement of the twisting motions themselves. Whether the same thread-like structures appear across all quiet regions, and how they evolve over time, will require follow-up observations.
The road to this result
Sunrise-III is the third mission in the Sunrise balloon program, and its 2024 flight demonstrated the value of stratospheric solar astronomy: a 1-meter telescope, freed from most atmospheric blur, can resolve magnetic structures that remain invisible to larger ground-based instruments.
The peer-reviewed paper, led by Masahito Kubo of NAOJ and colleagues, appears as "Three-dimensional Magnetic Field Structure of a Quiet-Sun Region Revealed by SUNRISE III/SCIP" in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2026), DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae909b. The National Institutes of Natural Sciences provided the information on which this report is based.
via Phys.org Space & Astronomy (Source)
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