The cosmos is a beautiful mystery, but one we’re unraveling bit by bit. It helps that new technology and imaging advancements allow us to view outer space in ways we’ve never seen before. The Inouye Solar Telescope is one example. As the world’s most powerful telescope, it recently captured the sharpest photo of the sun we have so far. What the image revealed was that our closest star is covered in literal whirlpools of activity. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature and, among other things, help explain why the surface of the sun is so hot.
The swirls seen in the photograph are magnetic fields being twisted and moved by the motion of hot gas. It demonstrates the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which has to do with fluid fluctuations. In this case, it’s the hot gas. The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability happens when there are two horizontal parallel fluid streams with different velocities and densities. It explains, for instance, how ripples become giant waves in the ocean. In the sun’s case, this creates “space weather.”
Despite its distance from Earth, space weather can disrupt our power grids and satellites. As Dr. David Boboltz from the U.S. National Solar Observatory explained to the BBC, “To figure out and eventually predict space weather, we want to understand the physics of the sun, all the way down to the smallest scales.” The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is also a clue to why the sun is so hot. “Once there’s enough energy wound up in the higher layers, it can then be released, as a flare or what’s known as a coronal mass ejection,” Boboltz continues.
Knowing more about the sun can help us understand our world at large, down to the basic principles of physics. One notable example is proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, in which the first experimental proof came from observing solar eclipses. “So simply for human knowledge,” Boboltz concludes, “we need to have experiments like this.”
