Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun

This 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/). 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). It appears also (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).

The Nature paper is open-access at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 in case folks want to read the details.

Some of the images (d,e,f in Fig.1) in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 remind me of fractals.

Don't look directly at them.

Not to undermine how cool this is but is there any reason why we are only getting a looped 3 second video?

More direct link: https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-ena...

The 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 ...

I wonder if we will ever discover life inside stars. There's definitely complex stuff going on in there.