What if the forces that can knock out power grids, crash satellites, and paint the sky with auroras are born from spinning rings of fire — silently swirling 150 million kilometers away, inside our own Sun's atmosphere?
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Today, we're covering a landmark discovery published in early 2026 by a team at the University of Hawaiʻi's Institute for Astronomy. For the very first time, scientists have clearly identified turbulent vortex structures in the Sun's outer atmosphere — plasma formations that look, unmistakably, like smoke rings drifting through space. And they've tracked those structures as they travel millions of kilometers into the solar system.
Stay with us to the end. We think you'll see the Sun in a completely new light.
📋 Table of Contents
Table of Contents
- What Is the Solar Corona — and Why Is It So Strange?
- How Do Scientists Study Something Nearly Invisible?
- What Did the UH Team Actually Discover?
- The Physics: What Is Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability?
- Can These Vortex Rings Really Travel That Far?
- Why This Discovery Matters for Space Weather
- Eclipse Images + Parker Solar Probe: A New Paradigm
- What Questions Does This Open Up?
The Sun's Hidden Turbulence: A Discovery 12 Years in the Making
What Is the Solar Corona — and Why Is It So Strange?
Most people picture the Sun as a simple ball of fire. The reality is far weirder — and far more compelling.
The Million-Degree Paradox
The Sun's visible surface, the photosphere, glows at roughly 5,500°C. Just above it sits the corona — the tenuous, shimmering outer atmosphere. Temperatures there routinely exceed 1,000,000°C and in active regions can spike to 3,000,000°C.
That's deeply counterintuitive. Walk away from a campfire and you get cooler, not hotter. Yet the corona defies that logic. Something pumps energy from the Sun's interior upward, converting it into heat and kinetic motion in ways we're still working to understand. Physicists call this the coronal heating problem, and it has puzzled solar scientists for over 75 years.
Turbulence, as this new research suggests, may be one of the key mechanisms responsible.
How Do Scientists Study Something Nearly Invisible?
The corona is about one million times fainter than the solar disk. On any ordinary day, the Sun's glare wipes it out completely. You can't simply point a telescope at it during a regular afternoon.
Why a Total Solar Eclipse Is a Scientist's Greatest Opportunity
A total solar eclipse changes everything. When the Moon slides precisely between Earth and the Sun, it covers the brilliant disk for a few extraordinary minutes. The corona emerges — a silver halo laced with magnetic field lines and plasma threads that can stretch millions of kilometers into space.
These moments are breathtakingly rare. Any given location on Earth sees a total solar eclipse only once every few centuries on average. Getting useful scientific data during that window takes years of preparation, precision instruments, and a team willing to travel across the planet chasing the Moon's shadow.
Shadia Habbal, an astronomer at UH's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), has been doing exactly that since roughly 2014. Her team has built an archive of high-resolution eclipse images spanning nearly 12 years — a complete 11-year solar cycle. That kind of sustained, long-baseline dataset is genuinely rare in astronomy. And it's what made this discovery possible.
What Did the UH Team Actually Discover?
Smoke Rings and Rolling Waves in the Sun's Atmosphere
Inside the corona's magnetic structures, Habbal's team identified two distinct types of turbulent features:
- Vortex rings — looping plasma structures that curl like smoke rings drifting slowly through still air
- Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instabilities — rolling, wave-like patterns strikingly similar to the rippled edge of a storm cloud on a gusty afternoon
Both types form at the same critical location: the sharp boundary between solar prominences and the surrounding coronal plasma.
Where Do These Vortex Structures Come From?
Solar prominences are large, arch-shaped concentrations of plasma, rooted on the solar surface and looping high into the corona. They're dramatically cooler — by hundreds of thousands of degrees — and significantly denser than the million-degree plasma swirling around them.
That contrast creates a fault line. Where very different temperatures, densities, and flow speeds share a boundary, instability follows. Nature doesn't tolerate sharp gradients for long. They break down. And when they break down in the solar corona, they produce the curling vortex rings and rolling wave patterns that Habbal's team photographed for the first time.
The Physics: What Is Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability?
The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) is named after two titans of 19th-century physics: Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824–1907) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894). It occurs when two fluids — or plasmas — flow past each other at different speeds. The velocity difference between them creates a shear layer, and that layer eventually breaks down into a series of rolling vortices.
You've seen this before. Wind blowing across a calm lake generates ripples and then waves. Those gorgeous, rippled "mackerel sky" clouds — where rows of cloud puffs look like fish scales — are KHI playing out in Earth's atmosphere. The same physics operates in the Sun's corona. Just at a scale that would dwarf entire continents.
Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability Across Environments
The Mathematics of Instability
Alfvén Speed — VA
Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) · Solar Corona
The Alfvén speed sets the threshold for magnetic wave propagation in magnetized plasma. In the solar corona it reaches hundreds of km/s. When the flow-speed difference between two adjacent plasma streams exceeds VA, magnetic tension can no longer hold the boundary stable — turbulence inevitably follows.
Variable definitions
| Symbol | Physical quantity | SI unit |
|---|---|---|
| VA | Alfvén speed — the speed at which magnetic perturbations travel through magnetized plasma | m s−1 |
| B | Local magnetic field strength | T |
| μ0 | Magnetic permeability of free space — universal constant equal to 4π × 10−7 T·m·A−1 | T m A−1 |
| ρ | Plasma mass density — total mass of charged particles per unit volume | kg m−3 |
Kelvin–Helmholtz Instability Condition
Magnetized plasma shear · Prominence–corona boundary
When the velocity shear ΔV between two adjacent plasma streams exceeds the magnetic threshold on the right, turbulence grows at their shared boundary. At prominence edges in the solar corona, steep jumps in density, temperature, and flow speed push well past this threshold — generating the vortex rings and rolling KH waves captured by the University of Hawaiʻi team.
Variable definitions
| Symbol | Physical quantity | SI unit |
|---|---|---|
| ΔV | Velocity shear — the speed difference between two adjacent plasma streams at their shared interface | m s−1 |
| ρ1, ρ2 | Mass densities of the two adjacent plasma regions (e.g. cool prominence plasma and hot coronal plasma) | kg m−3 |
| B1, B2 | Magnetic field strengths in each plasma region — stronger fields stabilize the boundary and resist turbulence | T |
| μ0 | Magnetic permeability of free space — 4π × 10−7 T·m·A−1 | T m A−1 |
| > | Inequality: when the left side exceeds the right, the boundary is dynamically unstable and vortex structures grow | — |
Can These Vortex Rings Really Travel That Far?
This is where the discovery becomes truly remarkable — and where it breaks new ground.
Previous studies had found hints of turbulence near the solar surface. But nobody had systematically tracked the same structures from their birthplace in the corona all the way out into interplanetary space. Not until now.
Parker Solar Probe Connects the Dots
Habbal's team combined their eclipse images with data from WISPR — the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe onboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe. Parker Solar Probe, launched in August 2018, is the closest-ever spacecraft to the Sun, regularly diving inside 10 solar radii from the solar surface. WISPR is its sole imaging instrument, designed to capture white-light images of the corona and inner solar wind from that uniquely intimate vantage point.
By matching structures visible in eclipse images close to the solar surface with features later detected by WISPR farther out, the team built a continuous observational chain — from birth to interplanetary journey.
"For the first time, we were able to watch these turbulent structures form near the Sun and then follow them as they flowed outward with the solar wind," Habbal said. "Seeing the same features later in space-based images tells us they remain intact over enormous distances." phys
The numbers back it up. Beyond 3 solar radii from the Sun's center, vortex rings travel at an average speed of approximately 249 kilometers per second — perfectly consistent with the slow solar wind. For reference, that's about 895,000 km/h — fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in about 26 minutes.
Why This Discovery Matters for Space Weather
Space weather isn't just an astronomer's concern. Its effects reach directly into everyday life.
The solar wind — a continuous outflow of charged particles streaming from the Sun — fills the entire solar system and shapes the magnetic environment of every planet orbiting within it. The slow solar wind, which this research now directly links to prominence-generated turbulence, has historically been the hardest variant to predict. Its exact sources, heating mechanisms, and acceleration profiles have been debated for decades.
This study ties slow solar wind behavior directly to traceable coronal structures. That's a significant step toward better forecasting.
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