Balloon telescope Sunrise-III maps unexpectedly tangled magnetic threads above the quiet sun

By the Everything Space news desk · 30 Sep 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Phys.org

The stratospheric observatory's detailed measurements could help explain how energy moves from the sun's surface to heat its outer atmosphere.

A research team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan has found surprisingly complex magnetic structures sitting above quiet regions of the sun, using data from the balloon-borne Sunrise-III observatory's 2024 flight through Earth's stratosphere.

The observations focused on the magnetic canopy, a layer where magnetic fields rooted in the sun's surface fan outward into the chromosphere above. Rather than forming a smooth, evenly expanding layer, the canopy turned out to contain many thin, elongated magnetic threads woven through it.

A numerical simulation matched these thread-like features and linked them to magnetic field lines that get twisted by movement at the solar surface, suggesting the structures arise from turbulent motion below.

In a separate look near the sun's visible edge, Sunrise-III also mapped the magnetic fields around spicules, jet-like plasma structures rising from the surface, tracking how the magnetic field's distribution changes with height.

Quiet-sun regions, which lack sunspots or other active features, cover most of the sun but have magnetic fields too weak to study in fine detail from the ground, where Earth's atmosphere blurs the view. Flying at 35 kilometers altitude, Sunrise-III's 1-meter telescope avoids much of that blurring.

The gondola carried three instruments from different countries, including a near-infrared spectropolarimeter developed under Japanese leadership that can track magnetic fields continuously from the photosphere into the chromosphere.

Researchers say the detailed maps of chromospheric magnetic fields could help explain how energy is carried upward from the sun's surface to heat its outer atmosphere, a longstanding puzzle in solar physics.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.