Most detailed images of the Sun reveal swirling 'whirlpools' driving space weather
See the Sun like never before with most detailed images yet
Using the world's most powerful solar telescope, scientists have captured the Sun's surface in unprecedented detail, revealing 'whirlpools' of activity caused by twisted magnetic fields. These vortices, known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, are key to understanding space weather that can disrupt power grids and satellites. The findings, published in Nature, could help predict such events and explain why the Sun's surface is so hot.
Once there's enough energy wound up in the higher layers, it can then be released, as a flare or what's known as a coronal mass ejection.
- mturmon
This kind of observation is a big deal for solar physics.
It's been believed for decades that these small-scale (~100km and below) turbulent features are critical to understanding how energy dissipates in the Sun. And thus, how sunspots and flares form.
The subject has been very qualitative but is yielding on both observational and simulation fronts. I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s, and it had been true that MHD numerical simulations of significant volumes of the Sun (but at a scale fine enough to resolve these features) were not possible. That has obviously changed!
Additionally, it had been that the best solar observatories could not quite resolve these features. In the late 1990s some of the best images came from a couple of observatories in the Canary Islands (e.g., the 1-meter Swedish telescope -- https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/). The spatial resolution was perhaps in the ~100km range.
Of course, these are absolutely mind-boggling images. You're looking at a slice of the solar photosphere that has a temperature such that it activates a spectral line around 400nm. By isolating that wavelength, we can see what's happening at that temperature, and thus, sample a slice of the photosphere.
So, that had been the state of affairs. Now DKIST (4m aperture), with the particular instrument highlighted in OP, appears to be at a spatial resolution ~5x finer than the above imagery -- see Fig. 1c in the Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871 […]
- inatreecrown2
Some of the images (d,e,f in Fig.1) in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3
remind me of fractals.
- bluenose69
The Nature paper is open-access at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 in case folks want to read the details.
- cf100clunk
Don't look directly at them.
- x______________
Not to undermine how cool this is but is there any reason why we are only getting a looped 3 second video?