Most-detailed-ever view of the sun's surface revealed in new images from the world's largest solar telescope
For the first time, scientists have directly observed a 150-year-old predicted phenomenon on the sun's surface that could explain why the sun's atmosphere is far hotter than its surface.
New images from the world's largest solar telescope have revealed thousands of tiny whirlpools on the sun's surface, a phenomenon known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This discovery, published in the journal Nature, could help explain the sun's violent behavior and the mystery of why its outer atmosphere, or corona, reaches temperatures of around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit while its surface remains cooler.
The ultra-detailed observations were captured using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, which has a resolution sharp enough to detect structures just tens of miles across. The findings, which match computer simulations of the sun's photosphere, reveal that these vortices may play a role in building up the energy behind solar flares and coronal mass ejections, as well as contribute to heating the corona.
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