{"id":242298,"date":"2026-08-06T16:50:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T21:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tiny-vortices-discovered-on-the-suns-surface"},"modified":"2026-08-06T16:50:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T21:50:21","slug":"tiny-vortices-discovered-on-the-suns-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tiny-vortices-discovered-on-the-suns-surface","title":{"rendered":"Tiny vortices discovered on the sun\u2019s surface"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tiny-vortices-discovered-on-the-suns-surface2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the U.S. have made a discovery in solar physics. New images of the sun\u2019s surface taken with the world\u2019s largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO in Hawaii, along with sophisticated computer simulations, reveal tiny plasma vortices that had never before been visible.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo detect the vortices, we needed to resolve structures on the solar surface about 20 kilometers (12 miles) in size. That is at the limit of what even the world\u2019s largest solar telescope and state-of-the-art simulations can achieve,\u201d said MPS scientist and co-author of the new publication Michiel van Noort, who, among other things, contributed to the observations and conducted the data reduction and image restoration. The researchers used a broadband imaging camera provided by MPS.<\/p>\n<p>The vortices occur at the edges of so-called granules, which densely cover the sun\u2019s visible surface. They measure between 500 and 2,000 kilometers (310 to 1,240 miles) in diameter. Taken together, they form the sun\u2019s granulation: a pattern reminiscent of bubbles in a boiling liquid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the U.S. have made a discovery in solar physics. New images of the sun\u2019s surface taken with the world\u2019s largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}