Astronomers capture highest-resolution images of the sun, revealing Van Gogh-like plasma vortices

Highest-resolution solar images

Astronomers have captured the highest-resolution images ever obtained of the sun's visible surface, revealing swirling, vortex-like patterns in superheated plasma that resemble the shapes in Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting "The Starry Night." The observations, published on Wednesday 5 August 2026 in the journal Nature, were made using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located near the summit of the Haleakalā volcano on the island of Maui, Hawaii. With a 4-meter (13-foot) primary mirror, the Inouye telescope collects seven times more sunlight than any other solar telescope, allowing it to resolve features as small as 19 km (12 miles) across.

The research team, comprising scientists from the United States, Germany, and South Korea, had originally set out to test and fine-tune the telescope's capabilities. When they examined the results, they found continuously growing whirls of hot plasma with diameters ranging from about 19 km to roughly 170 km. The images show a portion of the photosphere, a relatively thin layer about 100 km deep compared to the sun's overall diameter of roughly 1.4 million km. Plasma on the surface reaches temperatures around 6000 Kelvin.

Kelvin-Helmholtz instability confirmed on the sun

The curly, circular patterns are not random shapes but the first detection of a phenomenon called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) on the surface of a star. KHI, first described in the 19th century, occurs when two parallel streams of fluids or gases move past each other at different velocities, creating shear at the interface. On the sun, the interacting streams consist of hot plasma moving within a magnetic field.

The interface can become unstable and develop wave-like vortices that grow in size until they break apart, not unlike waves out on a lake or out on the ocean in windy conditions.

KHI had been observed on Earth in clouds and water, and in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, but never confirmed on the sun. The phenomenon had been predicted by theory but never directly observed on a stellar surface.

When I was sitting there with my colleagues and we looked at these images for the first time, we immediately recognized these Kelvin-Helmholtz patterns, and we were super excited right away.

First author David Kuridze, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, told Gizmodo that understanding what happens at the sun's microscopic level is essential for grasping its magnetism and global dynamics.

Why it matters

The discovery could help explain a decades-long mystery: why the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. Thomas Rimmele of the National Solar Observatory said KHI is likely a mechanism contributing to the heating of the sun's outer atmosphere, calling it part of the solution to the longstanding puzzle of why stars have a corona at one million degrees Kelvin.

Understanding the sun's inner workings at small scales also has practical implications. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares can disrupt satellites, GPS navigation, power grids, and global communications on Earth. David Boboltz of the NSO said that to predict space weather, scientists need to understand the physics of the sun down to the smallest scales.

The researchers used a broadband camera from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Previous observations with the Inouye telescope had resolved details as small as 30 km and revealed the sun's surface as a patchwork of granular structures each about 1000 km across, roughly the size of France. The latest images push to the telescope's limit, capturing features down to 19 km.