In a landmark achievement for solar astronomy, scientists have unveiled the most detailed view ever of the sun’s corona — its superheated outer atmosphere — revealing bizarre, never-before-seen plasma features including delicate “raindrops” and a snaking, high-speed plasma stream. Captured using a cutting-edge adaptive optics system named Cona, installed at the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) in California, the new footage offers unmatched clarity of phenomena long obscured by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The images, coloured to represent hydrogen-alpha light, show cooler plasma tracing the sun’s magnetic fields in mesmerising loops and arcs.

Sharpest Solar Views Yet Reveal Coronal Rain, Racing Plasmoid, and Twisting Prominences

As per researchers at NJIT’s Centre for Solar-Terrestrial Research, the adaptive optics allow the 1.6-metre telescope to reach its theoretical resolution limit of 63 kilometres. Among the findings is the sharpest view yet of coronal rain — narrow filaments of plasma falling back to the solar surface along magnetic field lines, some just 20 kilometres wide. Unlike Earth’s rain, these plasma threads arc and loop in response to the sun’s magnetism. Another striking discovery is the observation of a fast-moving ‘plasmoid’ — a stream of plasma racing across the corona at nearly 100 kilometres per second.

The footage also captured a rapidly reconfiguring solar prominence—plasma loops anchored to the sun’s surface, twisting and dancing under magnetic tension. Scientists believe such observations could illuminate the mechanisms behind coronal mass ejections and solar flares, major drivers of space weather. Researchers note that the sun’s surface appears soft and “fluffy” due to short-lived plasma jets called spicules, whose origins remain mysterious.

The team’s findings were published Tuesday, May 27, in the journal Nature.

Study co-author Philip Goode mentioned that “This marks the beginning of a new era in solar astronomy.” Researchers now hope to implement similar technology in larger instruments such as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaiʻi.