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Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the USA have made a groundbreaking discovery in the field of solar physics. New images of the Sun’s surface taken with the world’s largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO in Hawaii, along with highly sophisticated computer simulations, reveal tiny plasma vortices that have never before been made visible.
“To detect the vortices, we needed to resolve structures on the solar surface about 20 kilometers in size. That is at the limit of what even the world’s largest solar telescope and state-of-the-art simulations can achieve,” said MPS scientist and co-author of the new publication Michiel van Noort, who, among other things, contributed to the observations and conducted the data reduction and image restoration. The researchers used a broad-band imaging camera provided by the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research (MPS).
The vortices occur at the edges of so-called granules, which densely cover the Sun’s visible surface. They measure between 500 and 2,000 kilometers in diameter. Taken together, they form the Sun’s granulation: a pattern reminiscent of the bubbles in a boiling liquid. In fact, the granulation stems from plasma flows that rise from the Sun’s hot interior, cool down, and sink back into the depths. In the new study, researchers have now succeeded for the first time in visualizing fringed structures at the edges of the granules. Time and again, these structures display swirling motions resembling breaking ocean waves. Some of these “fringes” are little more than 20 kilometers wide. Resolving these delicate structures is comparable to discerning a one euro coin from a distance of 180 kilometers.
