On 30 September the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan released new results from Sunrise-III, a balloon-borne solar observatory that flew in the stratosphere in 2024 at about 35 km, where the Sun can be observed with very little atmospheric blurring.
Sunrise-III carries a 1-metre telescope. The Japanese-led SCIP instrument, which tracks the magnetic field from the solar surface up through the chromosphere, found thin, thread-like magnetic structures within the magnetic canopy above a quiet-Sun region.
A simulation reproduced these threads as field lines twisted by motions at the solar surface. Other observations mapped magnetic fields along spicules, the jets rising from the surface. The results appear in three papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
