The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling
The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling Ellsworth Toohey 9:15 am Sat Aug 8, 2026 Kelvin-Helmholtz instability — NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS, CC BY 4.0 (National Solar Observatory) The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. The swirls are the Sun's magnetic field being twisted and shoved around by the motion of hot gas.
- ▪The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling Ellsworth Toohey 9:15 am Sat Aug 8, 2026 Kelvin-Helmholtz instability — NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS, CC BY 4.0 (National Solar Observatory) The surface of the Sun has been photographed in mo
- ▪Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature.
- ▪The swirls are the Sun's magnetic field being twisted and shoved around by the motion of hot gas.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/08/sun-kelvin-helmholtz-vortices.html |
| Publication time | Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:15:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-08T16:35:43.848Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-08T16:35:43.848Z |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | QZ4KXM_7oAHi · 2 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The sharpest pictures ever taken of the Sun show it swirling Ellsworth Toohey 9:15 am Sat Aug 8, 2026 Kelvin-Helmholtz instability — NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS, CC BY 4.0 (National Solar Observatory) The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. The swirls are the Sun's magnetic field being twisted and shoved around by the motion of hot gas. Physicists call the effect Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and it turns up whenever two fluids slide past each other and small disturbances grow into spiraling vortices.
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