published their findings<\/a> in Nature on Aug. 5, 2026. The observations used a high-speed camera built by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, tuned to a wavelength of 416 nanometers, affording the highest resolution possible on the telescope. Each pixel spans roughly 4 miles (6 kilometers) of solar surface, and the full field of view covers an area roughly half Earth\u2019s diameter, at 3,600 by 2,700 miles (5,800 by 4,350 km) \u2014 only a small sliver of the Sun\u2019s disk.<\/p>\nThe image reveals a landscape of granules, the cell-like structures that make up the Sun\u2019s visible surface, or photosphere. Solar granules form when hot convection cells push plasma up to the surface. As the plasma spreads and cools, it descends along the dark lanes separating the individual granules. At the images\u2019 new level of detail, astronomers spotted whirlpool-like structures along those boundaries, measuring roughly 25 to 170 kilometers across.<\/p>\n
First described in the 19th century, the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability appears whenever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, curling their shared boundary into repeating waves. On Earth, it manifests occasionally in our atmosphere, when fast-moving air slides over slower air and curls the edges of clouds to look like breaking ocean waves. It also shows up in the magnetosphere, where the solar wind rushing past Earth rolls the magnetosphere\u2019s perimeter into swirling eddies.<\/p>\n
Once the team realized what they were looking at, the result still caught them by surprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we first saw the movies, of course, there was this big wow feeling, but we didn\u2019t at first know what we were looking at,\u201d Rimmele said. \u201c[It] took quite a while to do the interpretation of the data using the numerical models \u2026 to understand that this is really the signature of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those numerical simulations of the photosphere\u2019s magnetic and convective flows were produced by the High Altitude Observatory. Astronomers had long predicted that these vortices should exist in the Sun\u2019s photosphere, and the fact that the new observations matched the models helped verify those predictions.<\/p>\n
The findings may help answer one of solar science\u2019s biggest mysteries: As you move away from the Sun\u2019s surface toward the corona, the plasma heats up by orders of magnitude \u2014 the opposite of how we typically think of heat behaving. The team believes this heating can be explained in part by the work of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities they observed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we just found with this Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the photosphere are twisted vortices that twist the magnetic field,\u201d Rimmele said. Just like a twisted rubber band, the Sun\u2019s coiled magnetic field can store energy. This \u201cis a key ingredient for this coronal heating, transporting energy up into the corona and dissipating it there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Brooks Mendenhall <\/strong>is a staff writer for Astronomy magazine and is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back to Article List The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope’s new high-speed camera captured a fluid-dynamics phenomenon on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[270],"tags":[18,19,17,5,133,451,6420],"class_list":["post-652409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-science","tag-space","tag-the-sun"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117145547585690250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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