The Summer Solstice Is Here. What’s New With Our Sun?

The recent surge in solar activity is causing dramatic auroras to be visible in states further south than usual, even Alabama and Arizona. The colorful lights above were seen April 24 over Washington State.

Also known as the northern lights, they result when the solar wind’s particles interact with gases in our atmosphere.

Stargazers on April 20 witnessed a hybrid solar eclipse, which shifts from an annular to a total eclipse and happens only a few times per century. This scene from totality was observed in Exmouth in Western Australia.

In May, researchers shared this image from the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, which captured details within a sunspot. The dark region, where the magnetic field is strongest, is surrounded by bright neighboring filaments.

In two studies, physicists found that the solar wind, a scorching stream of plasma flowing out of the sun at a million miles per hour, might be driven by magnetic reconnection. In that process, regions of the sun with opposite polarity are pushed together until they snap.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany also simulated the whirlpool-like solar dynamo, revealing yellow islands of strong magnetic fields within a blue sea of weaker fields.

The sun also took on a red tint in a hazy yellow sky as smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed skies in the Northeast on June 7.

Sunlight usually bounces off of air molecules in a way that makes the sky appear blue, but because smoke particles are bigger, different wavelengths of light are scattered, giving the sun a scarlet hue.