Scientists at the National Solar Observatory have made a major breakthrough in solar physics with the help of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui.
By pushing the telescope to its limits, researchers were able to capture the highest-resolution images of the surface of the sun ever taken.
To learn more about what these images reveal about the nature of the sun, HPR spoke with National Solar Observatory Associate Director David Boboltz and Senior Scientist Friedrich Wöger.
Interview Highlights
On capturing the closest-ever look at the sun's surface
FRIEDRICH WÖGER: We were blown away by what we were seeing. We see these vortex-like structures develop, like waves on the ocean on a windy day. They curl and they grow and then they go away. That was really absolutely something we have never seen before.
The other part was, you know, there's these stripe-like structures that move, and it turns out that the underlying process is the same, and it is a well-known phenomenon in fluid mechanics that basically happens whenever you have two fluids that touch each other but move at different speeds. And when that happens, the friction between those two fluids make the interface between the fluids unstable, and you see these structures develop that really look like ocean waves. And the reason for that is that ocean waves out in the ocean in windy conditions are exactly the same thing.
DAVID BOBOLTZ: I was just blown away because you've never seen the sun like this. Even in our previous measurements that we made, these are just above and beyond. If you show them to any solar physicist, they're just blown away and saying, 'Wow, I really didn't expect that.'"
On what scientific questions these images answer
WÖGER: When we looked at them, we kind of already recognized there is this phenomenon there. It's, as I said, it's a well-known phenomenon, the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and we had to convince ourselves, however, that these are really that, right. … And once we are able to really convince ourselves that that actually happens on the sun, we can now continue further work. ...
How do we get from these tiny little small-scale structures that rotate and dissipate, meaning go away? How does that impact the large sun? And the answer is that the energy, the mechanical energy that comes from the boiling of the plasma on the surface of the sun, that's a large-scale mechanical energy that then gets converted by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability into smaller and smaller and smaller energetic particles, and you can see at the end it ends up being heat.
And the other part of that is that these mixing, these curling motions, they can actually start to twist and bend the magnetic field lines that, on the sun, that then are able to transport the energy into the higher layers of the solar atmosphere. And therefore, because it happens everywhere, and that was the other breakthrough discovery here is is that these Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are all over the place. And so you can imagine that they contribute each a little bit, but as a mass, a lot of energy that goes into the higher parts of the atmosphere.
And so the braiding of the magnetic field, together with the heat production, so to say, will hopefully trigger a lot more research into how much this actually helps with explaining these phenomena like flares, like CMEs, coronal mass ejections, like why is the corona of the sun so hot.
On the National Solar Observatory's future research
BOBOLTZ: This is sort of the setup for future work, right, and what could be done beyond this, right? This was a one-off experiment, but there's lots of new experiments that we can think about that would play into this or come from this experiment. And so, we're thinking about the Inouye itself as a very flexible tool, right? And this is just one aspect of it. We have four instruments on the Inouye that range from the visible part of the spectrum all the way out to the infrared part of the spectrum, and so we do both spectrographic measurements, which are measuring the magnetic fields, and then we do these visible imaging types of experiments. And so one of the things we could think about is trying to now extend this work and determine the magnetic fields that we see that we don't necessarily see from the imaging, but that we can do with the spectrograph.
More information about the National Solar Observatory and the solar images captured by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope can be found here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 10, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
