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Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space.

Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disrupt or damage our communications systems, power grids, GPS, and satellites, and researchers want to further understand how the sun builds up its magnetic energy so we better know how to guard against its massive fits of activity. They’ve also been trying to figure out why the sun’s corona, or atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.

Thanks to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which has pride of place at the National Solar Observatory on Maui, Hawaii, the highest-resolution image of the sun ever captured has revealed unique features that may give solar scientists some insight into how this magnetic energy builds.

Rippling forms that physicists call Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) demonstrate the effect of two fluids flowing past each other at different velocities. It’s a phenomenon named for the two scientists who observed it for the first time around 1870, and it can be seen in clouds, ocean waves, and the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

The Inouye telescope, the most powerful of its kind, was able to capture features smaller than 12 miles across, providing insights that remained hidden in earlier photos. The details may illuminate part of a solar process that scientists refer to as “flux braiding,” because the way the sun’s magnetic field lines move around one another result in a plaited effect. But the tension builds and builds before eventually breaking, which is when we see flares and similar events. The swirls of KHI may have something to do with how these twists happen in the first place.

“This could solve this biggest mystery of the last half a century for solar physics and astrophysics,” team scientist Dr. David Kuridze told The Guardian. “When you have this instability in the system, it is very easy to cascade the energy into smaller scales. And at some point, it just dissipates as a heat. This could make hot coronas, hot outer atmospheres of the sun and similar stars.”

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