The Sun’s surface is teeming with tiny plasma whirlpools no one had ever seen – some just about 20 kilometers wide. Captured with the world’s largest solar telescope, they could solve a long-standing puzzle in solar physics.
The sharpest images of the Sun ever
The structures were detected at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, run by the U.S. National Science Foundation in Hawaii – the largest solar telescope in the world. The vortices are only about 20 kilometers across, right at the resolution limit of even this instrument.
Like ocean waves
Observations, simulations and theory all point to the same cause: the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, the same phenomenon that curls ocean waves and shapes cloud patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The whirlpools twist magnetic fields and may build up the energy released in tiny solar eruptions known as nanoflares.
A long-standing solar puzzle
The vortices may even help explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere – the corona – runs around a million degrees hotter than the surface beneath it. That mismatch is one of the big open questions in solar physics. The study was published on 5 August 2026 in the journal Nature.
Sources: Scientific American, phys.org.
