This kind of observation is a big deal for solar physics.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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 -- <a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/" rel="nofollow">https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4715/</a>). The spatial resolution was perhaps in the ~100km range.<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3</a>). It appears also (<a href="https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/" rel="nofollow">https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/</a>) to be observing at 740Hz (!) for speckle reconstructions at ~1Hz.<p>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.<p>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).
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience with us.<p><i>I worked adjacent to this area from the 1990s-2010s</i> when the topic is solar physics is definitely why this forum is one of the last "places" of the internet.
Sure thing.<p>Remote sensing of the Sun is different from anything else, because you have so many photons. The idea of binning it down so fine (20x20km, 740Hz, a single nm of spectrum around a band center) is unheard of for any other target.
It was a great comment, HN still offers nuggets now and then
Silly question but how does a 4m aperture focused onto a smaller area not concentrate the heat and melt the instruments?
It's highly filtered, you are only getting a small slice of all of the wavelengths. Only a tiny fraction of all that energy hits the photo collector. I believe the collector is also actively cooled, but I might be wrong there.
Yes, just 0.5nm of spectrum in the instrument used (<a href="https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/" rel="nofollow">https://dkist.virtualsolar.org/vanNoortfastcam/</a>, see under “DataSetDescriptions.pdf”).<p>If the pixels really are 20x20km, located at 1AU, I get 500k photons (within that bandpass) per pixel per frame at 740 Hz, not counting optical losses.<p>Space solar instruments like HMI on SDO (<a href="https://science.nasa.gov/mission/sdo/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/mission/sdo/</a>) have one or more pre-filters in front of the instrument to block some light far from the passband and keep heating under control. I’m not sure if DKIST has such filters.
> The subject has been very qualitative<p>What does this mean?
People were identifying gross features (like the convection cells in the first website I linked), and giving those features names. Like “sunspots”, “faculae”, “pores”, “granulation”, “bright points”, etc. That’s on the observational side.<p>I’m less informed about simulations in this era - perhaps some simplified MHD simulations had been more quantitative in linking equations of state to the emergence of these features - but I believe they were not realistic enough to provide definite constraints on the scale of the structures.<p>It was clear that these features had to do with energy transport and some of the mechanisms were hypothesized. But the spatial scale of the gross energy transfer in these convective cells was not known, either through simulations or observation.
"Qualitative" means that the field had good conceptual theories, but didn't have sufficient observational and computational resolution to determine the detailed numerical values
quality vs quantity<p>seeing something new vs observing same stuff many many times to do statistics
The Nature paper is open-access at <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3</a> in case folks want to read the details.
Good 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!
Some of the images (d,e,f in Fig.1) in the nature article <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3</a>
remind me of fractals.
Don't look directly at them.
Just get yourself a pair of these DuckDuckGo Paso Robles and enjoy the view.<p><a href="https://knockaround.com/products/duckduckgo-paso-robles" rel="nofollow">https://knockaround.com/products/duckduckgo-paso-robles</a>
You can use a protective glass built into your monitor!
Not to undermine how cool this is but is there any reason why we are only getting a looped 3 second video?
Oh no—the sun is unstable! Run!
I wonder if we will ever discover life inside stars. There's definitely complex stuff going on in there.
You need some form of plasma that is stable and able to self organize. Is there any part of the physics where this is possible?
Stuff like a field-reversed configuration comes to mind. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-reversed_configuration</a> Conceivably, more complex plasma configurations could exist that are self-stabilizing enough to, you know, exist, but unstable enough to interact with each other in complex ways. Realistically... I doubt it. I'd love to hear from someone who knows about plasma dynamics, but I'd expect their answer to be more pessimistic, not less.
You mean inside of a sun or so?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
Obviously 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.
In Islamic teaching it is said that there are 2 other life forms. The first one is Angels, they are created from light. The second one is Jinn, they are created from smokeless fire.
Jinn is like human being, they need to drink, eat, have sex, have family,etc.<p>I don't know how to prove that.
More direct link: <a href="https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-enables-major-discovery-of-a-hidden-solar-process/" rel="nofollow">https://nso.edu/press-release/nsf-inouye-solar-telescope-ena...</a>
<a href="https://archive.is/YDn6S" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/YDn6S</a>
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 ...
The sun will destroy the earth long before it stops providing energy.
Why would the sun’s energy be taken away?
We still have our core<p>There may be rogue planets out there sustaining life far from any star..
There 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.<p>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.