Solar telescope captures plasma vortices on Sun surface

Astronomers have captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the sun's surface, revealing for the first time the direct presence of tiny, swirling plasma vortices driven by a fundamental fluid instability. The discovery, detailed in a paper published on August 5, 2026, in the journal Nature, provides a new window into the small-scale processes that may power solar eruptions and heat the sun's outer atmosphere.

Using the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, an international research team focused on a magnetically turbulent region near a sunspot on the sun's visible surface, known as the photosphere. The unprecedented sharpness of the images, resolving features as small as tens of kilometers across, allowed scientists to identify dense fields of small, vortex-like structures along the edges of magnetic patches. These patterns match the predicted signature of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), a phenomenon common in fluids and plasmas where adjacent layers moving at different speeds generate shear forces that evolve into wave-like or spiral motions.

The team's analysis, which combined the telescope data with advanced computer...