See the Highest-Resolution Views of the Sun’s Corona, as Wisps of Plasma Dance in Crystal Clear Detail
Astronomers have captured videos of the sun without the typical blur caused by turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere

The sun’s corona is a site of scientific intrigue for its erratic eruptions and massive, stringy loops of plasma called prominences. But we can only see this outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere during a total solar eclipse—and even then, astronomers on the ground can’t get a clear view of it, since Earth’s own atmosphere makes it appear hazy.
“The turbulence in the air severely degrades images of objects in space, like our sun, seen through our telescopes,” Dirk Schmidt, an adaptive optics scientist and project lead at the National Solar Observatory, says in a statement. “But we can correct for that.”
To focus on the corona in striking detail, researchers at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the New Jersey Institute of Technology developed a new optical technology called Cona, which can compensate for the turbulence-related blur. Installed in the Goode Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, Cona has captured the highest-resolution images to date of the sun’s corona. The new visuals give researchers a detailed look at streaky “coronal rain,” fierce solar prominences and mysterious plasma streams that astronomers say had never been seen before.
Schmidt and his colleagues published the crisp images and descriptions of the new tech in the journal Nature Astronomy last week. By using this method to see our nearest star, researchers could reveal more about solar flares, coronal mass ejections, space weather and the still-mysterious uneven heating of the sun.
Scientists took images of the sun’s corona during the summers of 2023 and 2024. In the new solar views, the plasma is artificially colorized to appear pink, with darker-looking areas translating to brighter regions.
The corona’s fluffy appearance is caused by short plasma jets called spicules. These fast-moving jets pop up all across the sun like blades of grass, but they remain poorly studied. Previous simulations of these spicules, however, suggest they force plasma out of the sun, creating a carpet of magnetic waves along its surface that may help propel solar wind, the flow of charged particles from the star.
Cona also revealed stunning views of coronal rain, or city-sized droplets of plasma that fall to the sun’s surface as they cool. Earth’s rain falls in roughly a straight line back to the ground due to the planet’s gravitational pull, but since the plasma “rain” is electrically charged, it will follow the sun’s magnetic field lines and fall back as long arches or loops, writes Daisy Dobrijevic for Space.com. These threads can be narrower than 12.5 miles.
To achieve these unprecedented views, Cona uses a mirror that reshapes itself 2,200 times per second to compensate for the blur caused by air turbulence. It’s “like a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera—but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands,” study co-author Nicolas Gorceix, chief observer at the Big Bear Solar Observatory, says in the statement.
Before Cona, experts used adaptive optics to study the sun’s surface instead of its corona, since the fine details of the wispy outer atmosphere were too intricate to see clearly. Previous methods could only reach a maximum resolution of 621 miles, per the statement—and it had remained that way for 80 years. With Cona, the visibility of the corona improves to 39 miles. “These findings offer new invaluable observational insight that is vital to test computer models of coronal processes,” says Thomas Schad, an astronomer at the NSO and study co-author, in the statement.
Scientists from the @NSF NSO and @NJIT produced the finest images in the Sun’s corona to date! To make these high-resolution images, the team developed a new ‘coronal adaptive optics’ system which removes blur from images caused by Earth’s atmosphere. https://t.co/IKnNvl4pho pic.twitter.com/GG4OZ6zqJq
— National Solar Observatory (@NatSolarObs) May 27, 2025
The team hoped their work could shed light on why the sun’s corona is significantly hotter than its surface—by millions of degrees. Astronomers have suggested that tiny explosions called nanoflares could be heating the corona or that tornado-like spirals of plasma could be raising its temperature. But this remains an open question.
Other observations also provided more mystery than answer. One of Cona’s new videos shows feathery pink plumes of hot plasma alongside an oddly shaped plasma stream, which the team calls a “plasmoid.” This feature, traveling more than 60 miles per second off the sun’s surface, is likely the first of its kind ever seen.
“We are currently lacking a definitive explanation,” Schmidt says to Jonathan O’Callaghan at New Scientist. “I believe this could be something new, and it will be exciting to see how other scientists pick this up.”