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Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36d4376nd2o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36d4376nd2o, https://archive.is/YDn6S https://archive.is/YDn6S
- nsxwolf 1mo agoStars are nifty. They seem like they're just gigantic balls of plasma, but they have all this hidden structure.
- cf100clunk 1mo agoDon't look directly at them.
- eviks 1mo agoYou can use a protective glass built into your monitor!
- sebastiennight 1mo agoInstructions unclear, I just burned my Retina.
- doodlebugging 1mo agoJust get yourself a pair of these DuckDuckGo Paso Robles and enjoy the view. https://knockaround.com/products/duckduckgo-paso-robles https://knockaround.com/products/duckduckgo-paso-robles
- igleria 1mo agokinda a bummer that it somewhat looks like it does have a camera for the untrained eye. Defeats the whole purpose of "be X but also make it obvious it's X"
- rootusrootus 1mo agohttps://archive.is/YDn6S https://archive.is/YDn6S
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- nomel 1mo agoMore direct link: https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-enables-major-discovery-of-a-hidden-solar-process/ https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-ena...
- tomhow 1mo agoWe updated the main link, many thanks!
- lucb1e 1mo agoEyeing that title and given the more more concrete article introduction sentence > Scientists using the U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope have made a major breakthrough in solar physics, discovering Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun — a finding that could help explain explosive solar activity and other solar phenomena. Perhaps it make sense to unclickbait the title by replacing "a hidden solar process" with "Kelvin-Helmholtz instability"
- tomhow 1mo agoOK, we've rewritten the title, thanks!
- mturmon 1mo agoThis kind of observation is a big deal for solar physics. It's been believed for decades that these small-scale (~100km and below) turbulent features are critical to understanding how energy dissipates in the Sun. And thus, how sunspots and flares form. The subject has been very qualitative but is yielding on both observational and simulation fronts. I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s, and it had been true that MHD numerical simulations of significant volumes of the Sun (but at a scale fine enough to resolve these features) were not possible. That has obviously changed! Additionally, it had been that the best solar observatories could not quite resolve these features. In the late 1990s some of the best images came from a couple of observatories in the Canary Islands (e.g., the 1-meter Swedish telescope -- https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/ https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/). The spatial resolution was perhaps in the ~100km range. Of course, these are absolutely mind-boggling images. You're looking at a slice of the solar photosphere that has a temperature such that it activates a spectral line around 400nm. By isolating that wavelength, we can see what's happening at that temperature, and thus, sample a slice of the photosphere. So, that had been the state of affairs. Now DKIST (4m aperture), with the particular instrument highlighted in OP, appears to be at a spatial resolution ~5x finer than the above imagery -- see Fig. 1c in the Nature paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3). It appears also (https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/ https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/) to be observing at 740Hz (!) for speckle reconstructions at ~1Hz. At this scale, vortices of the flow are well-resolved -- where before you just resolved the convective cells but not the turbulent features around them. It's these turbulent features that are transporting energy. To contextualize with respect to a HN perennial topic: DKIST (commissioned 2021) is funded by NSF, from the same pile of money that once funded Arecibo (up to 2020).
- robertlucas 1mo agoThanks a lot for sharing your experience with us. I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s when the topic is solar physics is definitely why this forum is one of the last "places" of the internet.
- mturmon 1mo ago
- x______________ 1mo agoNot to undermine how cool this is but is there any reason why we are only getting a looped 3 second video?
- jdnier 1mo agoCheck out the last video on the page. It zooms in and you get a sense of just how much resolution there is.
- x______________ 1mo ago> Check out the last video on the page. It zooms in That's what I mean, it's a looped 3 second video of the same animation, zoomed in a few times.
- bluenose69 1mo agoThe Nature paper is open-access at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 in case folks want to read the details.
- modeless 1mo agoI wonder if we will ever discover life inside stars. There's definitely complex stuff going on in there.
- shevy-java 1mo agoYou mean inside of a sun or so? Current life depends heavily not only on RNA/DNA, but also water. I can not see how it is possible to have an information system (such as RNA/DNA) without water possible. Enzymes, even of extremophilic organisms, have a fairly small range where they can work. I think the temperature record is at about 122°C or so as highest temperature. At 150°C, if I recall correctly, ATP has a life cycle of 0.1 seconds or even less than that. Life is very fragile on every level. In principle one could think of synthetic biology maximizing on all aspects including scenarios not constrained by "classical" life, but even then I can not really imagine how it were based on RNA/DNA without water. One could dispute whether metabolism belongs to life, but even if we were to state that metabolism need not be a defining feature (viruses may not need metabolism on their own, but they are cellular parasites, and in turn energy is required to maintain life, even if it is a dormant life stage such as seeds or what not), I can not imagine a system that could function differently here without a need for water. If you mean any other solar system in general then it is pretty likely that life is possible on many of them, but logically there would have to be conditions that could yield life, and I think this is quite difficult. For instance, there is no life on Mars and never was, despite NASA trying to milk more money for a "quest" (besides, any such quest is pointless as there is already life on Earth, I fail to see the logic addiction here that more life has to be found "outside"; if the evolution of life is logical, and I believe it is, then it really is irrelevant how often this exists outside of this planet). If you refer just to stars alone then I do not see how the conditions can yield life. The heat is extreme, it destabilizes almost everything. Even the radiation is deadly. Earth is rather rare here in conditions, see the term Goldilock planets.
- modeless 1mo agoObviously not based on DNA/RNA. I think it is pretty lacking in imagination to believe that DNA/RNA in liquid water is the only possible configuration of atoms that could make a self-replicating and evolving organism.
- shevy-java 1mo agoThe Sun impresses me. So much energy to dish out, so little of that is taken by planet Earth yet it helped yield and maintain life. Now what will happen when that energy is taken away ...
- Razengan 1mo agoWe still have our core There may be rogue planets out there sustaining life far from any star..
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1mo agoThere is. They had a civilization long ago, but now they're down to a small village and only have a radio that they use once every 1000 years. I managed to talk to them a few years back on my ham. They asked me to send them energy, I told them we'd need to figure out fusion energy first and that we'd get back to them next millenium.
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoWhy would the sun’s energy be taken away?
- bormaj 1mo agoIt's the impending and inevitable heat death of the universe... several billions of years away...
- beart 1mo agoI think you're off by about 90 orders of magnitude for the actual heat death
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoOur nearest star, Sol, will grow cold well before then. But even that is estimated to take trillions of years after it runs out of hydrogen for fusion.
- inatreecrown2 1mo agoSome of the images (d,e,f in Fig.1) in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 remind me of fractals.
- thatoneengineer 1mo agoGood to know this is "discover" in the sense of "confirm, understand better" rather than "suddenly find out about". Otherwise this would be quite the background-tv-in-a-disaater-movie headline!
- inigyou 1mo agoOh no—the sun is unstable! Run!
- polycancel 1mo agoWell at that seems to be one of main thing on mind of the Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth
- webdoodle 1mo agoDid they ever discover who was piggy backing off there systems? https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-and-why-the-fbi-mysteriously-shut-down-a-federal-solar-observatory/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-and-why-the-fbi-mysterio...
- watersb 1mo agoThe article discusses the court case, janitor at the observatory the accused.
- LetsGetTechnicl 1mo agoI do not pretend to understand any of this but I damn I love science
- codethief 1mo agoYesterday[0] I learned that supernovae can be driven by Kevin-Helmholtz instabilities, so when I saw the title I was already getting worried. :) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49198503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49198503
- deadlast2 1mo agoThe light from the sun is white so with all these anomalies would the color of this light not change even slightly.
- IAmBroom 1mo agoThis information is about the nature of skin pores on an elephant. The elephant is still a big gray animal. Different levels of observation.