Stunning New Images Reveal Whirlpools on the Sun's Surface. The Swirling Structures Might Help Power Solar Flares

The highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun's surface revealed whirlpools of plasma only 20 kilometres wide — the same instability that curls ocean waves and Jupiter's clouds — and it may explain why the Sun's outer atmosphere runs a million degrees hotter than the surface beneath it.

The National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, on Maui, has produced the highest-resolution images yet taken of the Sun’s surface, and they show something researchers had predicted but never directly confirmed: spinning vortices of plasma, some as narrow as 20 kilometres across, forming at the boundaries of magnetic structures in the photosphere. The images and analysis appear in a paper published in Nature on 5 August 2026,…

Stunning New Images Reveal Whirlpools on the Sun's Surface. The Swirling Structures Might Help Power Solar Flares

Observed directly in the solar photosphere for the first time, the vortices might braid magnetic fields, thought to be responsible for energy buildups and eventual outbursts. The features also offer clues about why the sun’s outer atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than its surface

Get Up Close to the Sun in the Highest Resolution Image Ever Captured

Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space. Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disr…

The sun’s surface has whirlpools. Here’s why they may be the engine behind space weather.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s something slightly odd about the fact that we’ve had solar telescopes for more than a century and still couldn’t quite see the sun’s surface. We’re already aware of the big stuff: plasma bubbling in convective cells, sunspots forming where magnetic fields bunch up, radiation bursting outward on an 11-year cycle. However, the fine-grained dynamics at the boundaries of magnetic structures were harder to…

The Sun's magnetic field flips every 11 years, a turnover so fast that current models struggle to explain how its magnetic flux dissipates, and a new paper says the missing piece might be plasma whirlpools, some as small as 20 kilometres across, confirmed on the Sun's surface for the first time

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, on the summit of Haleakalā in Maui, has produced the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s surface. Buried in that resolution is something nobody had confirmed there before: small, spinning whirlpools of plasma, some as narrow as 20 kilometres across, churning along the edges of the Sun’s magnetic structures.The finding comes from a paper published in Nature on 5 August 2026, “Ubiquitous Kelvin-H…