The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface

We expected them to be there, but they had previously been too small to see.

The short version

• Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes.
• It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s.
• We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.

What happened

For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous.

Why it matters

Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun’s atmosphere.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.