Astronomers using the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii have captured the most detailed images ever obtained of the sun’s surface, revealing features smaller than 20 kilometers across in a magnetically active region near a sunspot. The observatory, operated by the US National Solar Observatory and located near the summit of Haleakalā volcano on Maui, represents the world’s most powerful solar telescope.
The new images show small whirlpool-like structures identified as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, or KHIs. These vortices form when fast-moving plasma slides past slower-moving fluid, creating shear at the interface that develops into spiralling disturbances. While scientists have previously observed KHIs in Earth’s oceans and lakes, as well as in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, their presence on the sun has never been confirmed until now. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
The discovery may provide answers to a longstanding puzzle in solar physics regarding the extreme temperature differential between the sun’s surface, which measures approximately 6,000 degrees Celsius, and its corona, the outer atmospheric layer, which reaches millions of degrees. The swirling vortices are now considered a key mechanism for understanding how magnetic field lines become twisted and tangled, creating the tension that drives powerful solar explosions including flares, jets, and coronal mass ejections.
These magnetic phenomena are driven by the movement of hot, charged plasma within the sun, though the underlying physics remains incompletely understood. The newly identified instabilities may explain how energy cascades into smaller scales before dissipating as heat, a process that could account for the heating of the sun’s corona and similar stellar atmospheres. Solar explosions powered by magnetic field fluctuations can cause significant disruption on Earth, affecting power grids, satellites, GPS systems, and global communications infrastructure.
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
Article summary produced by Claude AI