Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery using adaptive optics to reveal the sun’s corona, its outermost layer visible only during total solar eclipses. The technology has produced the most detailed images and videos of fine-structure in the corona to date, opening doors for deeper insights into its behavior.
The 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory has been equipped with a new adaptive optics system called “Cona,” which compensates for air turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere, similar to how autofocus works on smartphones. This technology allows researchers to correct image degradation caused by turbulent air and reveals fine details of the corona.
The team made remarkable observations, including a movie of a solar prominence unveiling fine, turbulent internal flows and another showing rapid formation and collapse of plasma streams. They also captured images of coronal rain, where cooling plasma condenses and falls back toward the sun’s surface.
This breakthrough is significant as it resolves the structure and dynamics of cooler solar plasma at small scales, which is crucial to understanding the coronal heating mystery and space weather phenomena like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The precision required demands large telescopes and adaptive optics systems like Cona.
The development of Cora opens a new era in solar physics, promising many discoveries in the years to come. This technology will be adopted at observatories worldwide, transforming ground-based solar astronomy.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-05-raindrops-sun-corona-optics-stunning.html