World’s Largest Solar Telescope Confirms Plasma Vortexes on the Sun

The vortexes are produced by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which occurs when two fluids moving at different speeds cause their boundary to ripple and roll into swirls. The physics behind this instability was worked out in the late 1860s and has long been observed on Earth, such as when wind creates ripples on water or clouds shear into curved rows. For decades, scientists argued that the same process must happen with plasma on the Sun, but no telescope had been powerful enough to see it. The structures are extremely small, only a few dozen kilometers in diameter, below the resolution limit of every telescope with a mirror smaller than 2 meters.

The Inouye telescope, a 4-meter instrument operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation, entered its operational phase in November 2021. It is the largest solar telescope in the world and the first able to resolve these vortexes. The images, shared by NASA, were captured in visible light and show a region of the Sun spanning roughly the radius of Earth. Unlike the ultraviolet or X-ray views produced by space-based observatories, this visible-light image reveals a surface covered with petal-like swirls and folds. According to NASA, it is the highest-resolution visible-light image of the Sun ever obtained.

The team’s study proposes that the abundance of these vortexes may change how scientists understand the movement of heat, mass, and magnetic energy through the Sun’s atmosphere. Better knowledge of the solar corona could improve predictions of coronal mass ejections, which are responsible for geomagnetic storms that threaten satellites and power grids on Earth.