The Sun’s surface looks a lot busier than scientists realised.
Using the NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, researchers captured the highest-resolution images of the Sun ever taken and identified swirling whirlpools around magnetic boundaries on the solar surface. The features are known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, or KHI, and had been predicted for decades but never observed on the Sun.
“We were truly amazed by the incredible amount of small-scale detail and dynamic activity visible in the high-resolution images,” solar physicist David Kuridze of the US National Solar Observatory told ScienceAlert.
“What really surprised us was just how many KHI events we found. Seeing how truly omnipresent they are across the magnetic surface was something we really didn’t expect at all.”
Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are spiral-like patterns that form at the boundary where two fluids slide past each other. Scientists had expected them to appear in the Sun’s turbulent plasma, but earlier instruments did not have the resolution to detect them.
That changed in April 2025, when the telescope observed a magnetically active region near a sunspot and recorded a timelapse of solar plasma in motion.
When the team processed the data, they identified what they said were the telltale signs of KHI vortices. They then used numerical computer simulations to test that result.
“Providing the evidence that ‘what looks, walks, and quacks like a duck actually is a duck’ is much more difficult, and could only be achieved with the highest spatial resolution data of the solar surface ever acquired, and the most complete and detailed numerical computer simulations ever performed (just for this purpose),” solar physicist Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory told ScienceAlert.
“It was a very exciting time because the implications could be so far-reaching.”
The researchers said the observations showed the whirlpools were an almost ubiquitous feature at the boundaries between magnetic structures and the surrounding convection. They appeared repeatedly where fast-moving plasma sheared past slower plasma at magnetic boundaries, and the simulations reproduced the same behaviour.
“The real surprise was seeing just how ubiquitous KHI actually is all across the surface,” Kuridze said.
“To generate it in a real physical system, you need a remarkably delicate balance between competing physical forces. So discovering that these strict requirements are satisfied practically everywhere at the boundaries of magnetic elements is simply astonishing.”
Wöger said the finding could help scientists understand the small-scale physical processes linked to larger solar mysteries and disruptive space weather.
“Modern society depends on technologies that are vulnerable to space weather. To better understand and eventually forecast the Sun’s most disruptive behaviors, we first have to understand the tiny physical processes that drive it,” Wöger said.
“This discovery reveals one of those processes for the first time at a level of detail we have not seen before.”
The findings have been detailed in Nature.
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