Sun's surface photographed in finest detail yet, revealing plasma waves never seen before

Astronomers have captured the most detailed images of the Sun's surface ever taken. The pictures were produced by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation on the island of Maui, Hawaii. They show an unusual, dynamic structure of the star that has never been observed before.

The researchers initially used the instrument for a different purpose — calibrating and testing the limits of the telescope. But when they examined the data, they found that the Sun's bright outer shell had been recorded at a resolution surpassing all previous observations. The frames also revealed strange feather-like patterns rippling across the surface.

Solar physicist Ruizhu Chen of Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, compared these structures to the swirling brushstrokes in Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night." In her words, the images resemble the famous painting.

Scientists interpreted what they saw as a result of instability arising from streams of magnetized plasma moving at different speeds. This phenomenon is analogous to ripples on water stirred by a gust of wind and is well known to physicists as a process governing fluid behavior. Similar effects have been observed on Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, but never before at this level on the solar surface, noted study co-author Friedrich Woger of the National Solar Observatory.

The findings were published in the journal Nature. The images themselves, as the authors emphasize, were a byproduct of technical tests, yet their scientific value turned out to be high.