The most detailed pictures of the sun ever taken have caught a surprising new feature. High-energy whirlpools, it seems, speckle the surface of our star.

The sun is a giant ball of superhot, electrically charged gas called plasma. The sun’s surface is unstable, the new images hint. That instability — the swirling plasma — could end up twisting the sun’s magnetic field. And that, in turn, could build up energy that later gets unleashed as a solar explosion.

This could explain why the sun occasionally flings out violent bursts of radiation. Known as solar flares, such outbursts shape space weather. They, in turn, can affect technology on and around Earth.

Researchers shared their new findings August 5 in Nature.  

Big telescope spies tiny details

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope sits near the summit of the Haleakalā volcano in Maui, Hawaii. The biggest solar telescope in the world, its 4-meter (13-foot) mirror captured the new images.

They show swirls of plasma across a patch of sun 19 kilometers (12 miles) wide. It’s a “level of detail that was simply invisible until now,” says David Kuridze. An astrophysicist, he works at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colo.  

To get such a crisp view, Kuridze’s team had to fix blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere. This removed distortions that would have ruined the images, says Leon Ofman. He works at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. An astrophysicist, he did not take part in the new study.

The new pictures brought highly magnetized regions on the sun’s surface into focus. There are millions of these regions, called solar magnetic elements. The borders between these elements churn with a special type of instability, Kuridze’s group found. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, or KHI.  

A KHI occurs when two layers of fluid — such as plasma — move next to each other at different speeds. A small disruption in the balance of these two forces can cause curling motions. Those motions roll up into waves. 

Scientists have seen a KHI in some ocean waves and clouds on Earth. They’ve also spotted it in the atmospheres of Jupiter and the sun. But no one has ever seen it on the sun’s surface — until now. 

A KHI could turn energy from swirling plasma into the energy behind solar explosions. This helps explain how energy moves from inside the sun to its exterior, Ofman says, “affecting us on Earth and beyond.”