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See the Sun through the eyes of the world's most powerful solar telescope

Whirlpools on the Sun revealed by super-telescope

Have you ever wondered what the surface of the Sun really looks like?

You should never look directly at the Sun without special protective eyewear and even for scientists its intense heat and radiation make it very difficult for spacecraft to get close enough to study it in detail.

But now, thanks to the world's most powerful solar telescope, scientists can see our nearest star in more detail than ever before.

New images have revealed giant swirling patterns on the Sun that look a bit like whirlpools.

The pictures were taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, which is the world's most powerful solar telescope.

The image shows an extreme close-up of the surface of the Sun, captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope. It shows a fiery orange glow with patterns that look almost like etchings of leaves across the surface. These patterns are evidence of "swirls of instability" on the Sun's surface.NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

These are the highest-resolution images of the Sun's surface, or photosphere, that have ever been captured

The special solar telescope is based high on a mountain, where the sky is clear and free from dust, allowing scientists to zoom in on the Sun like never before.

The images show the Sun's visible surface, called the photosphere.

The Sun does not have a solid surface like Earth because it is made of plasma, a super-hot, electrically charged gas.

Scientists say the whirlpool-like patterns are caused by something called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

This happens when different layers of fluid or gas move past one another at different speeds.

On Earth, a similar process can help small ripples in the ocean grow into larger waves. On the Sun, it happens in plasma heated to thousands of degrees.

Researchers believe these swirls could help explain how energy moves from the Sun's surface into its outer atmosphere, and how magnetic energy builds up before powerful bursts of solar eruptions called solar flares or coronal mass ejections.

The image shows the fiery orange surface of the Sun with an ejection of what looks like an arch of flames protruding from the surface on the right. This is a coronal mass ejection - a sudden blast of solar plasma and magnetic fields that the Sun sends into space.NASA/SDO

Illustration of a coronal mass ejection emanating from the Sun. These events, CMEs for short, are powerful releases of solar charged particles

The Sun is a star made mostly of hot plasma - around 5,500°C - and it is constantly moving and bubbling.

The new images show swirling vortices, or spinning whirlpools, that scientists have never been able to study in such detail before.

BBC Science Correspondent Vic Gill says, this "constant swirling is a driving force behind bursts of energy from the Sun".

Dr David Kuridze, an astronomer at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO), told BBC News: "These twisting motions are creating magnetic energy, which can build up to produce those large-scale explosions."

These powerful outbursts can create space weather, sending energy and tiny charged particles racing across the Solar System.

They can also produce the dazzling auroras in the sky often called the Northern Lights Or Southern Lights, depending on where you are in the world.