Tiny Plasma Whirlpools Discovered on the Sun's Surface

Scientists have captured previously unseen plasma vortices swirling across the surface of the Sun, revealing tiny structures that could help explain how our star stores, moves, and releases magnetic energy.

The discovery comes from researchers at the National Solar Observatory, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory in the USA. The team combined observations from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world's largest solar telescope, with advanced computer simulations.

The newly detected vortices appear along the boundaries of structures known as granules, which densely cover the Sun's visible surface. Individual granules are typically between 500 and 2,000 kilometers across. For the first time, scientists were able to resolve extremely fine, fringe-like structures along the edges of these granules, some measuring only slightly more than 20 kilometers across — roughly equivalent to identifying a one euro coin from 180 kilometers away.

The researchers believe these swirling flows are evidence of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, a familiar phenomenon in fluid dynamics that develops when two fluids move alongside one another at different speeds. The same basic process appears in many environments — on the surfaces of lakes, in ocean waves, in cloud formation, and in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

The newly observed plasma vortices may offer an important clue to how the Sun stores and releases energy within its magnetic field, including through tiny bursts of radiation called nanoflares. Current theories suggest that magnetic energy builds up as the Sun's magnetic field lines become twisted and coiled. One major unanswered question has been what causes those magnetic field lines to become twisted in the first place. The newly discovered vortices could supply part of the answer.

The analysis also indicates that the mini-vortices are highly effective at mixing magnetized and non-magnetized plasma at the solar surface, which could help magnetic fields move quickly from the surface upward into the Sun's atmosphere — potentially explaining the Sun's rapid roughly eleven-year activity cycle.