The polar regions of the Sun remain among the least-explored territories in solar physics, yet they play a crucial role in driving the solar magnetic cycle, generating the fast solar wind, and shaping space weather throughout the heliosphere. Limited by the Earth’s position in the ecliptic plane, past missions have only provided oblique views of the poles, leaving their behavior and evolution poorly understood. This observation gap has left three top-level scientific questions unanswered: How does the solar dynamo work and drive the solar magnetic cycle? What drives the fast solar wind? How do space weather processes globally originate from the Sun and propagate throughout the solar system? The Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO), scheduled for launch in January 2029, aims to address this gap by achieving the first direct imaging observation of the Sun’s poles from high heliolatitudes. Using multiple Earth flybys and a Jupiter gravity assist, SPO will reach an orbital inclination of up to 75° (80° in an extended mission), with a 15-year lifetime (including the 8-year extended mission) covering an entire solar cycle. In order to achieve its scientific goals, SPO will carry a suite of remote-sensing and in-situ instruments to measure the vector magnetic fields and Doppler velocity fields in the photosphere, to observe the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths, to image the corona and the heliosphere up to 45 solar radii, and to perform in-situ detection of magnetic fields and charged particles in the solar wind. The mission’s vantage point will allow extended observation periods above ±55° latitude, including during the next solar maximum around 2035, when a polar magnetic field reversal is expected. By directly imaging the poles, SPO will provide invaluable insights, revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun and the space weather processes.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has captured the motion of spirals of dust around a young star and shown that the winding motion of the spiral pattern is conducive to planet formation. This provides new evidence for planet formation around this young star. The results could have implications for other young stars as well.

Carrie Masiello, the W. Maurice Ewing Professor of Biogeochemistry at Rice University, has been elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest Earth and space science association.

SAN ANTONIO — September. 24, 2025 — The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has selected Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Christopher Glein to present the Carl Sagan Lecture at its Fall meeting. He will present “Seafaring in Space: A Personal Voyage to Enceladus,” discussing the Saturn moon with a deep ocean beneath its frozen surface, offering some of the most compelling evidence of habitability in our solar system.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Compact Coronagraph-2 (CCOR-2) launched at 7:30 a.m. EDT on September 24 onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) observatory from NASA – Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida.

Researchers from The University of Western Australia node at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have uncovered a colossal bridge of neutral hydrogen gas linking two dwarf galaxies, which spans an astonishing 185,000 light-years between galaxies NGC 4532 and DDO 137, located 53 million light-years from Earth.