A team of American scientists has captured the most detailed images yet of the visible surface of the Sun, revealing tiny swirls of plasma never before clearly observed on the surface of any star, and which may help explain how the Sun stores magnetic energy before releasing it in the form of massive flares and explosions.
The observations were made using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on Maui Island in Hawaii, USA, which is the world's largest solar telescope with a four-meter diameter mirror.
The telescope was able to distinguish details, some as small as 20 kilometers across, roughly equivalent to seeing a coin from 180 kilometers away. The study's findings were published on August 5, 2026, in the journal Nature.
The discovered vortices appear at the edges of what are known as solar granules, which are cells of hot plasma ranging in diameter from 500 to 2,000 kilometers, covering the surface of the sun in a pattern resembling bubbles of boiling water.
When adjacent layers of plasma move at different speeds, shear forces are generated between them, and small disturbances begin to twist to form vortices resembling breaking waves in the sea.
Scientists call this phenomenon "Kelvin-Helmholtz instability," a phenomenon known in clouds, ocean waves, and the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, but this is the first time it has been observed directly on the surface of a star.
The researchers compared the telescope images with a sophisticated computer simulation of plasma motion and magnetic fields, and found a clear match between the observed vortices and the structures predicted by the physical models. The simulation also showed that these vortices bend the boundaries of the magnetic regions and twist the surrounding magnetic field lines.
Magnetic field lines can be likened to a spring that gradually twists; the more the lines twist, the more energy accumulates. This energy can be released suddenly when the magnetic lines break and reconnect, a process that can contribute to the generation of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which eject enormous amounts of plasma into space.
This may help in understanding one of the biggest mysteries of solar physics, the "solar corona," which reaches temperatures of more than one million degrees, while the visible surface temperature is only 5,500 degrees Celsius.
The study does not mean that the mystery of the solar corona has been definitively solved, but it does offer a possible mechanism that explains how very small movements on the surface can store energy and transfer it to higher layers.
Understanding these processes helps scientists improve the study of space weather, as powerful solar storms can affect satellites, communications, navigation, and power grids on Earth.
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