Our closest star has been delivering quite a show in recent months. The sun is spitting out fantastic flares, hurling solar material at Earth and triggering spectacular auroras. A video from the European Space Agency shows how the sun’s activity has ramped up over the last few years as it careened toward “solar maximum.” The video incorporates audio interpretations of flares, immersing viewers in the sun’s journey through both sound and visuals.
ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission—operated in collaboration with NASA—contributed the pictures. Solar Orbiter is a spacecraft launched in 2020 on a mission to take close-up images of the sun, snap the sun’s polar regions and study the solar wind. The video kicks off with observations from early 2022 and runs through mid-2024.
The sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, appears in yellow. The blue circles represent solar flares captured by the orbiter’s Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays instrument. Stronger flares are shown as larger circles. The clinking sound accompanying each flare is a sonification, a way of representing data through audio. The soundtrack changes depending on the flare and Solar Orbiter’s distance from the sun.
The sun seems to grow and shrink throughout the video. This is a product of Solar Orbiter’s path through space. It makes a close approach every six months. “We can see this in the video from the spacecraft’s perspective, with the sun moving closer and farther over the course of each year,” ESA said in a statement on Jan. 3. “In the sonification, this is represented by the low background humming that loudens as the sun gets closer and becomes quieter as it moves further away.”
The video shows just how intense the sun’s activity has gotten. Our star goes through a solar cycle. “Roughly every 11 years, at the height of the solar cycle, the sun’s magnetic poles flip—on Earth, that’d be like the North and South poles swapping places every decade—and the sun transitions from being calm to an active and stormy state,” NASA said in an explainer. The sun reached its solar maximum period as of October 2024 and could continue in this state for 2025.
Solar maximum is a great opportunity for aurora fans to catch sight of light shows on Earth. Astronauts up on the International Space Station have been documenting the aurora festivities from orbit. NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick shared a stunning timelapse of red and green aurora lights as seen from the ISS in mid-2024.
Increased aurora activity is one benefit of the sun feeling so peppy, but there can be potential disruptions as well. “Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy,” NASA’s boilerplate message for solar flares reads. “Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts.”
Overall, this is a fun time for space fans. Immerse yourself in aurora photos and enjoy ESA’s fun timelapse video showing how we got here. ESA calls it “solar fireworks.” That’s an apt description of our star’s current outgoing mood. Eventually, the sun will calm down again, but it’ll be a solar party for a while.
