The European Space Agency has released a timelapse showing prominence eruptions bursting outwards from the surface of the Sun.
The timelapse was produced using images captured by the Proba-3 mission, and shows three eruptions on the surface of the Sun occurring over a period of five hours.
Exploring the mystery of the Sun's hottest region
Our Sun’s inner corona is its hottest region, and appears yellow in this animation captured by Proba-3.
Proba-3 consists of two spacecraft flying in formation, able to create artificial eclipses by one spacecraft blocking out the Sun, and the other capturing images of the event.
This obstructs the Sun's bright central disk, enabling solar scientists to better see the eruptions coming from the Sun's surface.
One key element of the Proba-3 mission is exploring why the outer region of the corona is hotter than the Sun's surface.
More solar science
This seems to defy logic, and is known as the coronal heating problem.
"The corona is extremely hot, about two hundred times hotter than the Sun's surface," says Andrei Zhukov from the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Principal Investigator for ASPIICS.
"Sometimes, structures made of relatively cold plasma (charged gas) are observed near the Sun – although these are still around 10,000 degrees, they are much colder than the surrounding million-degree hot corona – creating what we call ‘a prominence’."
Capturing prominences
Prominences erupt and expand outwards from the surface of the Sun, firing plasma out into space.
The animation seen here uses observations captured by Proba-3 on 21 September 2025, when the Sun was particularly active.
One image was captured every five minutes, amounting to three prominence eruptions in five hours.
"Seeing so many prominence eruptions in such a short timeframe is rare, so I’m very happy we managed to capture them so clearly during our observation window," says Andrei.
Proba-3's ASPIICS instrument uses different filters to capture the Sun in different wavelengths of light, which correspond to different elements in the corona.
The prominence eruptions in this animation were captured in the spectral line emitted by helium atoms.
The yellow glow of the corona is caused by the scattering of visible light from the Sun's surface on coronal electrons.
