On December 24, 2024, NASA's Parker Solar Probe swept within 3.8 million miles of the Sun's surface — closer than any spacecraft has ever ventured — and caught something scientists have long suspected but never clearly seen: the Sun throwing material back at itself.
As a massive eruption of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME) blasted outward from the Sun, the probe's camera captured elongated blobs of that material falling back down, pulled by magnetic field lines snapping back into place. It's the Sun doing its own cleanup, and the high-resolution images reveal the process in unprecedented detail.
"We've previously seen hints that material can fall back into the Sun this way, but to see it with this clarity is remarkable," said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "This is a really fascinating glimpse into how the Sun continuously recycles its coronal magnetic fields and material."
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Start Your News DetoxHow the Sun's magnetic plumbing works
Here's what happens: A CME erupts when twisted magnetic field lines on the Sun's surface snap and realign explosively, like a rubber band released under tension. This magnetic explosion shoots billions of tons of charged particles outward into space. But the Sun's magnetic field doesn't just disappear — it tears open like fabric pulled too tight, then immediately tries to mend itself.
When those torn field lines rejoin, they create separate loops. Some loops escape into space as part of the CME. Others stitch back down to the Sun, and as they contract, they drag nearby blobs of solar material with them — the "inflows" that Parker Solar Probe observed. It's magnetic recycling in real time.
This recycling process matters more than it might sound. As those magnetic loops drag material back into the Sun, they reshape the magnetic landscape beneath the surface. That reconfiguration can subtly alter the trajectory of the next CME that erupts from that region — sometimes by just a few degrees.
"That's enough to be the difference between a CME crashing into Mars versus sweeping by the planet with no or little effects," said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist at Johns Hopkins. Some of the magnetic field released with a CME doesn't escape as scientists expected. It lingers for a while and eventually returns to the Sun to be recycled, reshaping the solar atmosphere in subtle but significant ways.
Other spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO have glimpsed these inflows from a distance, but Parker Solar Probe's position deep within the Sun's atmosphere allowed scientists to measure them precisely for the first time — their speed, their size, the scale at which they operate. These details are feeding into improved models of space weather that could eventually help predict how solar eruptions will affect Earth, Mars, and spacecraft across the solar system.
As Parker Solar Probe continues its record-breaking passes closer to the Sun, the data will only get richer. The Sun is currently transitioning from its most active phase (solar maximum) toward a quieter period, which means the next few years of observations could reveal even more dramatic magnetic reshuffling.
