Sun's Most Detailed Image Reveals Predicted Wave Vortices
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Astronomers at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii captured the most detailed images ever recorded of the sun's photosphere on 14 April 2025, in a narrow window before clouds forced the observatory's lens cover closed.
- The images revealed, for the first time, Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) — wave-shaped vortices long predicted to exist on the sun but never previously observed, appearing, in team member David Kuridze's words, 'everywhere' in the processed data.
- Kuridze of the National Solar Observatory compared the swirling patterns to the vortex structures in Van Gogh's The Starry Night and the curling crests in Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
- The Inouye telescope, positioned 150 million kilometres from the sun, resolved features as small as roughly 19–25 kilometres across — a scale team member Friedrich Wöger likened to spotting an average-sized ant on the ground from 160 kilometres away.
- KHI waves form on the boundaries of granules — plasma cells 500 to 2,000 kilometres in diameter — typically near sunspots or smaller magnetic pores, and may play a critical role in heat dissipation and the magnetic fields that drive solar weather.
- University of Sydney's Michael Wheatland called the observation 'incredible' and said the finding may help solve the long-standing coronal heating problem in solar astrophysics.
Why it matters: Until now, Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities on the sun existed only in theory; seeing them in the photosphere at ~20 km resolution gives solar physicists a concrete physical process to model — potentially sharpening forecasts of solar flares and storms that can disrupt electromagnetic systems on Earth.
