A part of the Sun that looks calm from afar can contain a fine network of magnetic threads. A ScienceDaily report on a study describes observations by Sunrise-III that revealed narrow, elongated magnetic structures woven through the atmosphere above a quiet-Sun region. The findings add detail to a layer of the Sun that is difficult to study and may help scientists investigate how energy moves upward through the solar atmosphere.
The report identifies an international research team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The cited paper, “Three-dimensional Magnetic Field Structure of a Quiet-Sun Region Revealed by SUNRISE III/SCIP,” lists Masahito Kubo and colleagues and appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Sunrise-III is a solar observatory built around a one-meter telescope. During its 2024 mission, it flew on a high-altitude balloon to about 35 kilometers (22 miles) above Earth, in the stratosphere. At that height, much of the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere is reduced. The gondola carried SCIP, a near-infrared instrument developed under NAOJ’s leadership to measure magnetic fields across layers of the solar atmosphere.
The observations showed many thin magnetic features in the chromosphere, the region above the Sun’s visible surface. The structures form part of a larger magnetic network called the canopy. Magnetic fields concentrated in the photosphere—the visible surface—spread outward and arch into the chromosphere. The new observations suggest that this canopy is less smooth and uniform than a simple expanding structure would imply.
To explore how the threads might form, the researchers compared the observations with computer simulations. The simulations reproduced the recorded patterns, and the report says the results suggest that movements on the Sun’s surface twist magnetic field lines, creating the intricate structures seen higher up. That offers a possible explanation for the pattern; the reported match does not by itself establish the full process or how much energy the structures carry.
Sunrise-III also examined a quiet region near the Sun’s visible edge, or limb. There, it measured magnetic fields within spicules: narrow jets of solar material that rise from the surface. The observations showed that the distribution of magnetic fields changes with height. The report does not provide a detailed profile of that change, but the measurement gives researchers another view of how solar magnetic fields vary through the atmosphere.
Quiet regions matter because they cover much of the Sun, even though their magnetic fields are generally weaker than those in more active areas. Their subtle features are hard to measure from the ground, where atmospheric turbulence can blur fine structure. A balloon-borne telescope high above most of the atmosphere can therefore reveal details that are challenging to resolve from Earth’s surface.
The observations offer clues to a broader question: how energy generated by motions near the solar surface travels into higher atmospheric layers and contributes to their heating. The report presents the findings as a step toward understanding how magnetic activity may help heat the Sun’s atmosphere, including areas that appear calm. It does not claim to have solved the heating problem. Instead, the mapped threads and changing fields provide more detailed structures for scientists to study as they investigate how the Sun’s magnetic environment works.