Scientists announce discovery of a hidden solar process
NSF Inouye Solar Telescope and computer simulations yield new insights into the Sun
Aug 11, 2026 - by Staff
An international team of scientists have announced the discovery of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) in the form of small, swirling, whirlpool-like patterns on the surface of the Sun. The research indicates that KHI might be a key reason why the Sun's outer atmosphere gets so hot, and why magnetic energy builds up and moves around on the Sun, ultimately fueling solar flares and eruptions that can affect Earth.
The team of scientists, from the National Solar Observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), and the German Max Planck Institut für Sonnensystemforschung (MPS), published their findings in the journal Nature. They used the world's most powerful solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope near the summit of Maui’s Haleakalā, combined with high-resolution computer simulations based on code (named MPS/University of Chicago Radiative MHD, or MURaM) jointly built and maintained by international teams, including NSF NCAR and MPS.
These simulations, run on the Derecho supercomputer at the NSF NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, played a critical role in enabling the research team to interpret the observations. They provided a 3D view of the solar atmosphere including layers that cannot be directly observed, thereby allowing the scientists to study processes hidden from direct observation.
The time-lapse video and images released this week reveal a solar landscape unlike any that had been seen before, uncovering small-scale and dynamic swirls everywhere at the edges of magnetic areas. This allowed for the unambiguous identification of KHI in the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the photosphere), providing the first experimental confirmation of a phenomenon that has long been predicted by theory but could only be revealed by the Inouye Solar Telescope’s high spatial resolution.
“It is very exciting to see that the highest-resolution observations of the solar photosphere revealed a new dynamical regime in the form of KH vortices at the edges of magnetic field concentrations,” said NSF NCAR scientist Matthias Rempal, a co-author of the paper. “These observations also provide the highest resolution validation of solar magnetohydrodynamic simulations to date, and the agreement in physical details is impressive.”
For more, see the National Solar Observatory press release.