It’s weird to think that the Sun — the closest star to Earth in the Universe, and by far the best studied — still has places on it we’ve never seen.

But Earth orbits the Sun very nearly over the Sun’s equator (our orbit is tipped by only about 7.25°) making it extremely difficult to see the Sun’s poles. They always appear very near the edge of the Sun’s face as seen from Earth, and they’re highly foreshortened due to perspective as we look at them around the Sun’s curved surface.

What happens at the poles is important — there are a lot of phenomena on the Sun that depend on latitude (such as its magnetic field, sunspots, and so on) where we see changes looking from the equator toward the poles. Not being able to see the poles means we can’t anchor our understanding with what’s happening there.

Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA/NASA mission that launched in 2020. Its mission is to study the upper layers of the Sun and try to help astronomers understand what drives the solar wind, the flow of particles away from the Sun that creates all of space weather. To do that it has to get as close to the Sun as it can, to see smaller details on the Sun’s surface, and it also needs to orbit the Sun on a tilted path that’s tipped enough to see over the poles.

And now it has! For the first time in 5 years in space the trajectory of Solar Orbiter (or SolO) has allowed it to peek “over the edge”, so to speak, of the Sun where it can now glimpse the south solar pole.

This video shows the difference (in extreme ultraviolet light) between what we see from Earth and what SolO now sees:

SolO was able to change its orbit using the gravity of Venus. Its orbit was set up so that every few times it goes around the Sun SolO passes by Venus at the “top” of its orbit (when its farthest from the Sun). It then uses a gravitational assist to give Venus a bit of its kinetic energy, which then drops SolO closer to the Sun. It’s done this a few times, changing the shape of its orbit, but not its tilt.

But in March 2025 engineers aimed SolO so that it approached Venus from a slightly different angle. It came in tipped at an angle to the plane of Venus’s orbit, so that when it flew past it shot away at a greater angle. This changed the orbital tilt relative to the Sun, which otherwise is very difficult to do; just burning an engine to change the tilt takes a lot of fuel. This way they get the change almost for free.

Here are some different views it got of the Sun during the south pole pass:

You can see from the grid marks that we are finally getting a decent view of the pole.

And it’ll get better: another planned Venus flyby will occur in December 2025, tipping SolO’s orbit by 24°! If an extended mission gets the OK then in 2028 and 2029 it will get assists to tip the orbit to 33°, which will generate fantastic views, less distorted by perspective.

After centuries of study, we’re finally getting to know the Sun’s surface in its entirety. Mind you, the Sun is the source of all light and heat for Earth, and we literally depend on it for our lives. Also, it’s a star, an actual gigantic ball of seething plasma right there on our doorstep, the key to understanding all stars everywhere. So understandably astronomers want to study it, including as up close and with the best view as possible.

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