The clearest images ever taken of the sun’s surface reveal striking wave patterns, reminiscent of those sometimes seen in clouds on Earth. Analysis of the patterns may improve our predictions of solar weather.

On 14 April 2025, with just a few minutes of their allotted time remaining at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and with clouds fast closing in that would force the closure of the observatory’s lens cover, a team of astronomers collected a series of extraordinary images – the most detailed ever recorded of the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere.

Most remarkably, the images revealed, for the first time, wave-shaped vortices known as Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) that had long been predicted to exist on the sun but had never before been observed.

“These swirling, vortex-like patterns are universal, appearing in cloud formations, ocean currents and across the cosmos,” says team member  at the National Solar Observatory in Colorado.

“A famous example is [Vincent] van Gogh’s The Starry Night, where the sky’s vortex structures closely resemble turbulent KHI structures,” he says. “A similar parallel appears in Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, where the curling crests of the wave echo the iconic shape of KHI billows.”

Another member of the team, , also at the National Solar Observatory, says that while the existence of some KHI in the solar photosphere was expected, it was a surprise to see the patterns “everywhere” in the images they processed.

The scale of what they were seeing was extraordinary – the telescope is 150 million kilometres from the sun, but it could pick out objects just a few tens of kilometres in length on its surface.

“Detecting and following the development of the 25 kilometre-size KHI vortices on the sun and identifying them as such is similar to identifying and tracking the motion of an average-sized ant on the ground from 160 km away,” says Wöger.

The KHI wave structures are formed on the boundaries of what the researchers describe as “granules”, structures between 500 and 2000 km in diameter, which are cells of rising plasma emerging from deep within the sun. The granules observed in the study were either close to a sunspot – a dark patch where magnetism blocks the escape of heat – or to one of numerous smaller sunspots called pores.

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The researchers think the KHI waves play a critical role in the dissipation and movement of heat. They may also influence the magnetic fields that drive coronal flares and other solar weather that can affect life on Earth and disrupt electromagnetic devices.

Wöger says the sun’s magnetic field is potentially impacted by KHI everywhere across its surface.

“To better understand and eventually forecast the sun’s most disruptive behaviours, we first have to understand the tiny physical processes that drive it,” he says. “This discovery reveals one of those processes for the first time at a level of detail we have not seen before.”

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A rocket launched last year is thought to have smashed into the lunar surface this morning, creating the moon's newest crater

 at the University of Sydney says that not only were the astronomers observing the sun at a finer scale than ever seen before, but they captured “something that looks incredible”.

“You zoom in, and you zoom in, and you zoom in, and then you see fundamental physics at the scale of 19 km – that’s just amazing,” says Wheatland.

He agrees that the discovery may help with understanding solar weather. 

“One of the outstanding problems in solar astrophysics is coronal heating,” he says. “It’s possible that Kelvin–Helmholtz instability is contributing to that.”

Astronomers have spotted one of the strangest-looking asteroids we have ever seen. The space rock, called 44 Nysa, was discovered in 1857, but it wasn’t until now that we had the observational capability to figure out its shape – and its shape is weird.

An E-type asteroid, which is a relatively rare type rich in a mineral called enstatite, 44 Nysa circles the sun in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is the brightest E-type asteroid we know of and one of the largest, with an average diameter of about 75 kilometres, which makes it a tempting observational target.

at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and her colleagues used the Large Binocular Telescope, also in Arizona, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to take a closer look at 44 Nysa. They used that data to build a three-dimensional model of the asteroid, and found that it seems to have three lobes, each separated from the others by a thin “neck” that holds the asteroid together.

While two-lobed asteroids are relatively common, trinary ones are much rarer. It isn’t yet clear how exactly it formed – it could have once been a more normal-shaped asteroid and then been battered beyond recognition by other space rocks, or the three lobes could have once been separate and then joined together in what’s called a contact trinary. Either way, its interior must be strong to have stuck together.

Another wrinkle in the story is that 44 Nysa seems to have a tiny moon, just about a kilometre across. In future observations, measuring the moon’s orbit could give us more information about 44 Nysa’s interior structure, and therefore its origins.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is finally beginning its mammoth survey of the universe. After a year of testing and calibration, it is starting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is poised to become the most detailed record of the universe ever captured.

“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” said Brian Stone at the US National Science Foundation in a .

For the next decade, Rubin will collect about 10 terabytes of data every night in the form of hundreds of high-resolution images of the southern sky. Each image will cover an area about 40 times the size of the full moon, and the completed survey will include nearly the entirety of the sky that is visible from the southern hemisphere.

This treasure trove of data will serve several purposes. The first, which has already begun, is to alert researchers to anything changing in the night sky, such as the appearance of supernovae or the motion of asteroids and comets.

“Millions of alerts in just the last couple of months show that Rubin is up and running as a discovery machine,” said at Stanford University in California, who is part of the Rubin team. “Now we’re putting it all together.”

These alerts have already led to the discovery of more than 11,000 new asteroids, and they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created.

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In addition to canvassing the solar system, Rubin will provide information about more distant objects, building a detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy and peering deeper into the universe.

An early-release image (above) shows a sea of stars, interstellar gas and even distant galaxies. Such deep, detailed images taken again and again over 10 years will enable researchers to study rare cosmic events and even gain insight into dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the universe.