Scientists released the clearest pictures ever taken of the Sun’s surface this week, using the world’s largest solar telescope. The images, captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, showed a swirling patch of the Sun roughly the size of mainland Australia.
The detailed pictures revealed a process called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability happening on the Sun for the first time. This effect occurs when different fluids mix together, and scientists said it could help explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, was millions of degrees hotter than its surface.
University of Sydney astrophysicist Michael Wheatland, who was not involved in the research, said the images were incredibly exciting. He explained that scientists had suspected this process was happening on the Sun but had never before seen such clear evidence of it.
Researchers hoped the new images would help them better understand the Sun’s magnetic field, which drives space weather such as solar flares. These flares could cause beautiful auroras on Earth, but sometimes also caused power outages and damaged satellites, so predicting them accurately was important. Scientists were now planning further observations to learn even more about our closest star.
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