GoKawiilSolar swirls The spectacular image was taken by the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope based in Hawaii. (Courtesy: NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS)
An international team of astronomers has released the highest-resolution image ever captured of the Sun’s visible surface. Taken by the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the picture reveals tiny plasma whirlpool-like patterns that have never been seen before (Nature doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10871-3).
The Sun’s visible surface – the photosphere – is a thin layer of its atmosphere where the fluid plasma becomes transparent. This region is known to be dynamic and complex, with factors such as magnetic field and convection currents shaping the atmosphere.
The studied region by the astronomers is a magnetically active area close to a sunspot. In the image, the solar surface appears dominated by band-like and vortex-like structures.
The authors associate these features with Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, a well-known effect in fluid dynamics in which rippled structures form when two fluids slide past each other at different speeds.
This generates shear forces at the interface, causing minute disturbances to grow into wave- or vortex-like flows.
The vortices occur at the edges of so-called granules, which densely cover the Sun’s visible surface and measure between 500 and 2000 km in diameter.
Some of these “fringes” are little more than 20 km wide and resolving these structures is comparable to discerning a €1 coin from a distance of 180 km.
The findings provide the first known confirmation of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities on the Sun and researchers suggest that the instability might explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere gets so hot, and why magnetic energy builds up and moves around the surface.
“The newly discovered plasma vortices impressively demonstrate how minute processes – at the limit of what we can resolve using all available techniques – significantly determine the nature of our star,” notes Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.