"The sun's rhythmic rise and fall in the sky can make it easy to forget that our star is unpredictablea roiling, burbling mass of magnetically knotted plasma that governs the entire solar system. But a new video from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Proba-3 mission that shows a string of fountainlike explosions on the sun offers a powerful reminder of our home star's active nature."
"The Proba-3 mission, which launched in December 2024, consists of two spacecraft. Together, the pair of satellites create artificial total solar eclipses that give scientists a glimpse into the corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere. In September 2025 the mission captured particularly extraordinary footage of three separate outbursts in just five hours. Seeing so many prominence eruptions in such a short timeframe is rare, so I'm very happy we managed to capture them so clearly during our observation window,"
Proba-3 launched in December 2024 and uses two spacecraft to create artificial total solar eclipses for coronal observations. In September 2025 the mission recorded three separate prominence outbursts within five hours, an unusually high concentration of eruptions in one observation window. Solar prominences form when plasma flows along magnetic field lines into looped structures at the solar limb and can erupt outward when destabilized. A coronagraph blocks the sun's bright disk to reveal faint coronal light; Proba-3 advances that technique by separating the blocking and observing instruments across two satellites. Such observations shed light on coronal dynamics and magnetic processes that govern solar activity and affect the wider solar system.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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