You’ve never seen the Sun like this before. In a study published today in the journal Nature, researchers present the highest-resolution images of the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, ever obtained. The images are more than beautiful—they’re packed with critical information about the fundamental physics of our home star, including the first experimental confirmation of a long-theorized phenomenon that only the high spatial resolution of the Inouye Solar Telescope could reveal. “It is very important to understand what is going on at the Sun at the microscopic level,” first author David Kuridze, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, told Gizmodo. “This is very important if we want to understand the Sun, its magnetism, its global dynamics. We need to understand those small-scale microscopic fields.” Zooming in on the Sun A close-up view of a selected region from the Inouye Solar Telescope image reveals the extraordinary spatial resolution of the observations. The inset highlights deformed magnetic boundaries and ultra-fine dark striations (signatures of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability) at a scale of tens of kilometers. © NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS The National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, seated near the summit of the Haleakalā shield volcano in Maui, is the world’s most powerful solar telescope. With an unmatched mirror size of 13 feet (4 meters) across, it collects seven times more sunlight than any other, allowing it to produce exceptionally clear, detailed images of the photosphere.