The Sun's most detailed images yet reveal whirlpools never spotted before

The Sun is one of the things that’s keeping our entire solar system together. It keeps everything, from the biggest planets to even the smallest pieces of debris, locked in its orbit. The relationship with the Sun is what causes the seasons and climate to change here on Earth. But despite being the closest star to us, there’s still so much we don’t know about it.

Now, scientists have captured the most detailed image of it yet, and they’ve discovered something new hiding on its surface. Here’s a look at what they found.

This breakthrough came from the Inouye Solar Telescope, which is the world's largest solar telescope. Researchers from the National Solar Observatory, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, as well as the High Altitude Observatory, combined their observations with detailed computer simulations. 

Together, they were able to resolve features on the Sun's surface roughly 20 kilometers across. As MPS scientist Michiel van Noort put it, "That is at the limit of what even the world's largest solar telescope and state-of-the-art simulations can achieve."

The visible surface of the Sun is covered in granules. These are bubbling patches of plasma between 500 and 2,000 kilometers wide that rise, cool, and sink again. This is what gives the surface a boiling look. 

NSO astronomer Dr David Kuridze told BBC News, "These twisting motions are creating magnetic energy, which can build up to produce those large-scale explosions." During their research, they found thin, wave-like structures that curl into small swirling vortices along the edges of these granules.

As per researchers, these swirling patterns likely come from something called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. It happens when two layers of fluid move past each other at different speeds and creates friction at the boundary that lets small disturbances grow into full-blown waves or vortices. 

This is the same effect that shapes our ocean waves and even the swirling atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. On the Sun, neighboring streams of plasma along granule edges appear to move at different speeds. This creates exactly the conditions this instability needs to form.

Current theories suggest that the Sun's magnetic field lines twist and coil like a spring. That stored energy eventually escapes through a process called magnetic reconnection, in which the twisted field lines snap open and reconnect. This often triggers a solar flare or coronal mass ejection. But they didn't know what was causing this twisting. 

Now, the newly found vortices, which appear wherever the magnetic field is strong, could be part of the answer. Explaining this, NSO's Dr. Friedrich Woeger said, "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."