Scientists have captured images of the sun’s surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade.
It’s dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii.
Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they’d photographed the sun’s bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before.
What’s more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface.
The images “reveal a solar landscape unlike any that had been seen before, uncovering small-scale and dynamic swirls everywhere at the edges of magnetic areas,” the NSF’s National Solar Observatory said in a news release.
“That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh’s Starry Night,” said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research.
Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun’s surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds — similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It’s a well-known phenomenon called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) that guides how fluids move.
This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but “it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface,” according to study co-author Friedrich Wöger with the National Solar Observatory.
Dr. David Boboltz, deputy director at the National Solar Observatory, said the discovery, “backed up by analysis of numerical simulations, is a major step forward in our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of solar and stellar plasma, and will serve as a basis for future discoveries.”
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Scientists are curious about the sun’s inner workings to better track massive bursts of energy called coronal mass ejections that can hurl toward Earth. When they hit, they can trigger solar storms, potentially scrambling GPS communications and producing colorful auroras.
“To understand the dynamic space weather that affects Earth, we have to see the small-scale processes driving it,” said Dr. Jacqueline Keane, NSF program director for the National Solar Observatory. “For decades, seeing these vortices at such tiny scales remained elusive. By pairing a massive four-meter mirror with state-of-the-art optics and instruments, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope delivers the resolving power needed to reveal these ultrafine details for the first time, enabling discoveries that were once beyond our reach.”
