Spectacular images reveal never-before-seen whirlpools on the sun

Spectacular images reveal never-before-seen whirlpools on the sun

Strange whirlpools of plasma seen in the sharpest images ever captured of our star help explain the deep origins of Earth-threatening space weather and more

Here’s a deceptively simple question with a complicated answer: What does a star look like?

Of course, a star is a twinkling point of light in the heavens—or, in the case of our sun, a ferociously fiery orb of glowing plasma that dominates Earth’s sky. But what about a star’s actual visible surface, its so-called photosphere? Although this is the only part of the sun we can easily see, we’re surprisingly still in the dark about the photosphere’s fine details.

Now, however, unique observations from the world’s largest and best solar telescope are shedding light on this region’s secrets. Using the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) four-meter Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii, an international team of scientists has obtained the sharpest-ever images of the sun’s surface, revealing an alien vista covered in never-before-seen whirlpools of plasma. Validated with state-of-the-art computer simulations and published in Nature , the landmark result helps explain how energy moves through the photosphere and erupts into Earth-threatening “ space weather ” events.

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One thing that astronomers already knew is that the sun’s photosphere acts a bit like a pot of boiling water. Bubbling up as heat rises from below, thousand-kilometer-wide convective cells of plasma called “granules” undulate across our star’s face, with each granule outlined by canyonlike “lanes” carved by plasma flowing back down as it cools. Powerful magnetic fields loop through the photosphere as well, and where they are strongest, the plasma flattens into darker, colder “ sunspots ,” which occasionally unleash outbursts of plasma and radiation that can disrupt spacecraft, power grids and global telecommunications .

This tidy picture of the photosphere, however, is akin to having a crude map of Earth that shows subcontinents and seas yet leaves smaller features hidden; you might see spinning hurricanes and volcanic outbursts, but you won’t really know how they occur. The new DKIST images change that.