Ian Sample writes:

Golden bands and swirling vortices have been spotted on the sun in the most detailed images ever captured of the turbulent surface of our home star.

Astronomers observed the sun with the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, and saw new features smaller than 20km (12 miles) across in a magnetically active region close to a sun spot.

The unprecedented pictures show processes on the surface that are likely to explain the decades-long mystery of why the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. [Continue reading…]