Astronomers have obtained the highest-resolution images and video of the Sun’s swirling surface to date using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. The imagery shows a section of the Sun approximately 5,000 by 3,500 kilometres in size — large enough to encompass mainland Australia on Earth. What’s particularly exciting is that the observations revealed a physical process on the Sun’s surface that researchers had never seen before. The researchers observed a magnetically active region near a sunspot and saw feathery plasma patterns driven by what they described as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability — a phenomenon that occurs when different types of fluids mix, causing small fluctuations at the borders between them. These detailed observations may help scientists better understand why the Sun’s corona (its outer atmosphere) is so extraordinarily hot. Future observations with additional instruments could provide more data on plasma velocities and magnetic fields, potentially leading to improved predictions of solar flares and space weather.
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