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Scientists have captured the best ever images of the Sun’s surface – and spotted something never seen before.
To see the vortices, which are between 500 and 2,000 kilometres across, researchers needed to be able to peer at the Sun in finer detail than ever before. And a new telescope allowed them to do exactly that.
The images were actually intended as a test of the National Science Foundation's Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii. But when researchers looked back at the pictures, they realised that had photographed the bright outer shell of the Sun at a higher resolution than ever before.
What's more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface.
“That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh's Starry Night,” said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research.
Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun's surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds — similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It's a well-known phenomenon that guides how fluids move.
This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but “it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface,” according to study co-author Friedrich Wöger with the National Solar Observatory.
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Scientists are curious about the sun's inner workings to better track massive bursts of energy called coronal mass ejections that can hurl toward Earth. When they hit, they can trigger solar storms, potentially scrambling GPS communications and producing colourful auroras.
