Stunning New Images Reveal Whirlpools on the Sun’s Surface. The Swirling Structures Might Help Power Solar Flares

Observed directly in the solar photosphere for the first time, the vortices might braid magnetic fields, thought to be responsible for energy buildups and eventual outbursts. The features also offer clues about why the sun’s outer atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than its surface

Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow

August 12, 2026 2:19 p.m.

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The sun’s surface contains swirling whirlpools, each of which could fit inside a city—small structures, when it comes to stars. Now, astronomers have gotten the best look yet at these vortices, thanks to high-resolution images snapped from 93 million miles away on Earth, researchers reported August 5 in the journal Nature.

The observations provide the first direct confirmation of a type of fluid instability on the sun’s visible surface, called the photosphere. The findings can also help researchers better understand certain solar phenomena, like flares, and might help them solve a longstanding mystery about our stellar companion.

“My first reaction was: ‘Wow, how can we see such tiny, fine-scale structures on the sun?’” study co-author David Kuridze, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “This is something we have never seen before in any solar observations.”

When two fluids moving at different speeds slide past each other, the difference in velocity creates ripples at their boundary. These disturbances can then grow into curling vortices, like wisps of cream stirred into coffee, that scientists call Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHIs). Such swirls have previously been observed in bodies of water and cloud formations, as well as in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

Researchers have long theorized the vortices should be in the sun’s photosphere, too. That’s because the layer acts somewhat like a boiling pot of water. Hot plasma rises to the surface in bright patches called granules, and it cools and descends in the valleys between them. Magnetic fields also thread through the plasma and are concentrated in certain places. Along the boundaries of those magnetic concentrations, fluids can move at different speeds, producing the dynamics needed to trigger KHIs.

But telescopes have lacked the spatial resolution to distinguish these vortices well enough to confirm this theory.

Overview of Inouye Images and Simulations

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So, Kuridze and colleagues used the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located near the summit of the 10,000-foot-tall Haleakalā volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The instrument’s 13-foot-wide mirror is the largest of any solar telescope in the world. The team set the telescope’s sights on an active region near a sunspot—a cooler, darker region of the photosphere where magnetic fields are concentrated. It spotted stellar details down to the 12-mile scale, revealing dozens of vortices in unprecedented detail.

The feat is equivalent to seeing ants crawling on Earth’s surface from an altitude of 100 miles, study co-author Friedrich Wöger, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory, tells Scientific American Lee Billings.

To demonstrate that the structures were produced by KHIs, the researchers examined 47 vortices with widths ranging between about 16 and 106 miles. They then compared the observations with computer simulations of the sun’s surface. The simulated vortices had similar shapes, spacing, growth rates and apparent speeds, all of which were also consistent with predictions from KHI theory.

“This is a major breakthrough in solar physics,” Mihalis Mathioudakis, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland who was not involved in the research, tells Scientific American. And because the results come from direct images of the sun, he adds, they “will stand the test of time and be undisputed.”

The vortices might help scientists better understand solar activity that affects Earthlings. Their swirling motion probably braids magnetic fields, which scientists suspect causes energy buildups and eventual outbursts in events like solar flares, reports Scientific American. They can disrupt satellites, GPS signals and power grids on Earth.

The structures could also help solve one of the most persistent puzzles in solar physics: The corona, the sun’s wispy outer atmosphere, can reach up to 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, while the photosphere stays around 10,000 degrees. The fluid instability might cause energy to cascade into smaller scales, potentially getting dissipated into heat and contributing to the corona’s sweltering temperatures, Kuridze tells the Guardian.

“We are now beginning to understand that we need to study this process in order to understand all the stages of the transfer of energy from the interior [of the sun], going to the surface … and then affecting us on Earth and beyond,” Leon Ofman, an astrophysicist at the Catholic University of America who was not involved in the research, tells Science News’ Fechi Inyama.

Eli Stark-Elster is the AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow at Smithsonian magazine. He is a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on documenting the methods used to induce altered states of consciousness across cultures—he conducts fieldwork in southern Africa, where he studies the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His writing and research has been featured on NPR, Psyche and the Conversation. He also writes on his Substack, Unpublishable Papers.