![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4JKBVRF_Simulation_Figure_1_of_2_jpeg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nThe most detailed view of the Sun’s swirling surface to date has been captured in images and video by the world’s largest solar telescope. The imagery allows astronomers to study solar phenomena they have never seen before, and may help explain why the Sun’s corona is so extraordinarily hot. Future observations of the Sun will eventually help scientists predict space weather like solar flares.<\/p>\n
The Sun’s surface is constantly churning with hot, glowing plasma.<\/p>\n
Those swirling eddies play a huge role in the Sun’s occasional violent outbursts, but they’re difficult to see because it is so bright.<\/p>\n
Now astronomers have used the world’s largest solar telescope to capture the highest-resolution imagery ever taken of our star’s roiling surface.<\/p>\n
It shows a section of the Sun about 5000 by 3500 kilometres in size: a zone that, on Earth, could comfortably enclose mainland Australia.<\/p>\n
The stunning imagery also captures a never-before-seen physical process, which the researchers have described in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n
Michael Wheatland, an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney who wasn’t involved with the research, said the imagery was “just incredible”.<\/p>\n
“We’ve never observed the Sun at that resolution,” Professor Wheatland said.<\/p>\n
“In this amazing detail, we see all of this really interesting fundamental physics happening.”<\/p>\n
Whirling patterns on the Sun’s surface<\/p>\n
The observations show the solar surface, called the photosphere, constantly swirls and flows with plasma.<\/p>\n
According to the researchers, these ebbs and flows show the plasma undergoes a physical process called Kelvin-Hemholtz instability.<\/p>\n
This effect happens when different types of fluids mix, causing small fluctuations at the borders between them.<\/p>\n
“You see it in clouds, you see it in the ocean, you see it whenever you have fluids,” Wheatland said.<\/p>\n
“But we haven’t actually seen it on the Sun in a way that’s really unambiguous. I think the evidence here is completely unambiguous.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A side-by-side comparison of a real observation from the Inouye Solar Telescope (top left) and a synthetic image generated by state-of-the-art, physics-based computer simulations (top right).<\/p>\n
Supplied\/NSF\/NSO\/AURA\/MPS<\/p>\n
On Earth, this instability is often driven by fluids of different temperatures or densities, or moving at different speeds. On the Sun, the differences come from changes in magnetism.<\/p>\n
“When you mix the fluid, you move the magnetic field around as well,” Wheatland said.<\/p>\n
This mixing can lead to an increase in energy which could be the reason the Sun’s corona – the outer part of its atmosphere – is so hot.<\/p>\n
The Sun’s surface is roughly 5500 degrees Celsius, but the corona above it can reach 2 million degrees.<\/p>\n
The solar telescope in Hawaii<\/p>\n
Hannah Schunker, an astrophysicist at the University of Newcastle, said because the Sun was so close to Earth – a mere 149 million kilometres away – it was the only place astronomers could study the surface of a star in detail.<\/p>\n
“The Sun is like an astrophysical laboratory,” Dr Schunker, who also wasn’t involved with the new research, said.<\/p>\n
The observations were made with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, in Hawaii, which is run by the US National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n
Solar telescopes use the same basic technology as other large optical telescopes – large mirrors and lenses which magnify light – but since they’re designed to focus on the Sun, they need to be purpose-built.<\/p>\n
“The Sun is just so bright and produces so much more heat and light than a distant star,” Schunker said.<\/p>\n
“So it requires specialised filters, cooling systems and instruments that can be safely pointed at the Sun without damaging the telescope.”<\/p>\n
Friedrich Woeger, senior scientist at the US National Solar Observatory and co-lead author on the paper, said that while preparing for and analysing the observations required months of work, the imagery they captured spans only a few minutes.<\/p>\n
“The acquisition of the data used in the study itself actually did not take much longer than five minutes,” Dr Woeger said.<\/p>\n
Predicting space weather<\/p>\n
Schunker said it was important to understand the Sun’s magnetic field because it drives all space weather.<\/p>\n
While these images only capture a small part of the Sun’s surface for a small period of time, she said data and modelling like this could eventually be used to predict things like solar flares.<\/p>\n
“These very small-scale changes that are happening on the surface of the Sun, they are responsible for all the larger scale things happening in the atmosphere, and we’ve never been able to see them before,” Schunker said.<\/p>\n
Flares and other solar phenomena can cause bright auroras on Earth, and in serious cases prompt power outages and damage to satellites and other technology.<\/p>\n
“We can take the small-scale physics and put it into the larger-scale models, and this will open the door to, hopefully, better weather predictions, better predictions of flares, [and] better predictions of how heat is transported up to the corona,” Schunker said.<\/p>\n
Woeger said it would be valuable to have observations of a larger section of the Sun’s surface to get more data on the patterns they observed.<\/p>\n
“We are planning for future Inouye Solar Telescope measurements with instruments that provide more information about velocities and magnetic field of the plasma on the Sun,” Woeger said.<\/p>\n
Wheatland said the imagery signified an exciting time for solar astronomy.<\/p>\n
“Progress will be made in some of the big, outstanding questions in solar physics.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most detailed view of the Sun’s swirling surface to date has been captured in images and video…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":560238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-560237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}