High-energy whirlpools speckle the sun’s surface.
New telescope images show characteristic swirls of magnetized plasma across a 19-kilometer-wide patch of the sun’s surface. The observations, reported August 5 in Nature , are the most detailed taken of the sun to date. The images also provide evidence for a type of fluid instability that might explain the sun’s outbursts, such as solar flares and eruptions.
“This instability occurs everywhere at the boundaries of solar magnetic elements,” says astrophysicist David Kuridze of the National Solar Observatory headquartered in Boulder, Colo.
Solar magnetic elements are regions of highly magnetized…
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