Thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space weather.
Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other operational spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle.
The video above compares Solar Orbiter’s view (in yellow) with the one from Earth (grey), on 23 March 2025. At the time, Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 17° below the solar equator, enough to directly see the Sun’s south pole. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come.
“Today we reveal humankind’s first-ever views of the Sun’s pole,” says Prof. Carole Mundell, ESA’s Director of Science. “The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.”
All eyes on the Sun’s south pole
The collage above shows the Sun’s south pole as recorded on 16–17 March 2025, when Solar Orbiter was viewing the Sun from an angle of 15° below the solar equator. This was the mission’s first high-angle observation campaign, a few days before reaching its current maximum viewing angle of 17°.
The images shown above were taken by three of Solar Orbiter’s scientific instruments: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument. Click on the image to zoom in and see video versions of the data.
“We didn’t know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun’s poles are literally terra incognita,” says Prof. Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany.
The instruments each observe the Sun in a different way. PHI images the Sun in visible light (top left) and maps the Sun’s surface magnetic field (top centre). EUI images the Sun in ultraviolet light (top right), revealing the million-degree charged gas in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. The SPICE instrument (bottom row) captures light coming from different temperatures of charged gas above the Sun’s surface, thereby revealing different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere.
By comparing and analysing the complementary observations made by these three imaging instruments, we can learn about how material moves in the Sun’s outer layers. This may reveal unexpected patterns, such as polar vortices (swirling gas) similar to those seen around the poles of Venus and Saturn.
These groundbreaking new observations are also key to understanding the Sun’s magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity. Current models and predictions of the 11-year solar cycle fall short of being able to predict exactly when and how powerfully the Sun will reach its most active state.
