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About this Episode
Using data from total solar eclipses, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi uncovered turbulent plasma structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, including vortex rings and wave instabilities. These disturbances persist as they move outward, helping generate the solar wind.
This episode explores how eclipse observations refine our understanding of solar energy transfer and improve predictions of space weather that can disrupt satellites, communications, and power grids.
Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs.
This episode includes AI-generated content.
This episode explores how eclipse observations refine our understanding of solar energy transfer and improve predictions of space weather that can disrupt satellites, communications, and power grids.
Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs.
This episode includes AI-generated content.
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
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Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy.
Explore the wonders of the cosmos
with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast.
Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars,
planets, and beyond.
Perfect for unwinding after a long day.
Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe
as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.
I want you to trace in this formula real quick.
Just close your eyes for a second.
Imagine you are standing outside on a really perfect day.
It's mid-July, maybe.
You're at the beach or just hanging out in your backyard.
And you feel that warmth hitting your face.
It feels totally consistent, right?
It feels steady, like a reliable old radiator
that just keeps the whole planet alive.
It is a very comforting sensation, honestly.
It is the definition of stability for most of us.
Exactly, but here's the thing about that feeling.
It is a complete lie.
Oh, why?
It is a total illusion.
Because if we could strip away the distance,
if we could zoom in, and I mean really, really zoom in,
that steady ball of light is actually a screaming, chaotic,
nightmare of nuclear fire.
Well, nightmare might be a bit subjective,
but chaotic is definitely scientifically precise.
To us, it's a light bulb.
But up close, it's a battlefield.
Right, and usually when we talk about this,
we talk about the big explosions, the flares,
the coronal mass ejections that sound like a doomsday weapon.
Complete dramatic events, yeah.
But today, for this exploration,
we are looking at something different.
Something strangely organized amidst all that chaos.
I want you to picture a giant blast of glowing gas.
But instead of just exploding everywhere randomly,
it forms a shape, a very specific shape.
We are talking about turbulence,
but not just random turbulence.
We are talking about structure.
We are talking about smoke rings.
We are giant planet-sized smoke rings
rolling off the surface of the sun.
It sounds completely impossible,
but we are going to unpack a major new study
that says this is exactly what is happening right now.
And this isn't old news, by the way.
This is very fresh from the lab.
Literally, days old.
This study comes from the University of Hawaii at Manoa,
published just two days ago, February 18th, 2026.
It's in the Astrophysical Journal,
which I'm told is a pretty huge deal.
Oh, it is the gold standard for this kind of research.
If it is in there, the data has been put
through the absolute ringer.
The research is led by Shadia Hebal
at the Institute for Astronomy.
And what her team found, it basically changes
how we understand the sun's atmosphere.
They found that the sun is pumping out
these aerodynamic shapes vortex rings
that actually travel through space.
It's literally like the sun is blowing smoke rings at us.
It is a fantastic image.
But the physics behind it are even more interesting.
Because this is about energy transfer.
It is about the invisible machinery
that drives space weather.
And ultimately, it is about understanding
the environment we actually live in.
Because as you always remind me,
we don't just live on Earth.
We actually live inside the atmosphere of the sun.
We do, we absolutely do.
And that atmosphere is a lot more turbulent
than we ever thought.
So let's start this investigation.
We have the, what is the smoke rings on the sun?
But I really want to start with the how.
Because when I was reading through the study,
one thing stood out immediately.
They didn't find this using the $10 billion
James Webb telescope.
They didn't find it using the solar dynamics observatory
or some giant satellite.
No, they used the moon.
Right, they used a solar eclipse.
And I have to ask the really obvious question here.
We are in 2026.
We have probes that can literally touch the sun as atmosphere.
Why are we still relying on a rock floating in front
of the sun to do cutting edge science?
Why is the moon a better tool than our best technology?
It is a fair question.
It feels a bit analog, doesn't it?
Like using a sundial in the age of the Apple Watch.
Exactly.
It feels completely vintage.
But it all comes down to a very specific problem
in optics called dynamic range.
Think about it this way.
Imagine you were driving at night,
and a car is coming towards you with its high beings blaring.
You are completely blinded.
Yeah.
Now, imagine a moth flies right in front of those headlights.
Can you see the moth?
No way.
The glare is way too strong.
Right, the signal to noise ratio is impossible.
The sun is millions of times brighter
than its outer atmosphere, which we call the corona.
To see the corona that faint, wispy moth,
you have to block the headlight.
Which is what we do with satellites, isn't it?
They have those little metal discs inside them,
coronagraphs.
They do.
We build artificial eclipses inside our telescopes.
We put a little disc right in front of the sensor
to block the sun.
But here is the problem with that.
Defraction.
OK, block is through defraction.
When light hits the edge of that metal disc
into the telescope, it bends, it scatters.
It creates this fuzzy, bright edge.
To keep that stray light from completely ruining the image,
we have to make the blocking discs slightly larger
than the sun itself.
We have to over block.
Oh, so you're covering the sun,
but you're also covering the most interesting part.
The edge where the surface actually meets the atmosphere.
Exactly.
We lose the inner corona.
We lose the shoreline, basically,
because we are blocking the view of the ocean just
to save our eyes.
But the moon, the moon is perfect.
Nature's lens cap.
It really is.
It is effectively infinitely far away
from the observer on Earth, so there's
no scattering inside your eye or inside the telescope.
It fits over the sun with incredible precision.
When the moon blocks that bright disc,
we can see right down to the surface.
We get this eclipse view that reveals details
no satellite can match.
And the study mentions this specifically.
It says that standard satellite observations
show a smooth out view of the corona.
Right, if you look at a satellite image,
the corona looks like this soft, growing halo.
It looks almost static, like a painting.
But the eclipse view.
The eclipse view reveals the truth.
It isn't a soft halo at all.
It is made of thousands of sharp distinct threads.
It is far more dynamic.
Dynamic is just the polite scientist word for chaos, right?
In this context, yes.
It means everything is moving, twisting,
and changing constantly.
These threads are magnetic field lines,
and they're guiding the plasma in very complex ways.
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But here is the real kicker with this specific study
from the University of Hawaii.
They didn't just take one picture of one eclipse
and call it a day.
That's the other part that blew my mind.
An eclipse last, what, four minutes?
If you are lucky, sometimes it's two minutes.
So you have two minutes of data.
How do you build a massive scientific paper
on two minutes of data?
You don't, you wait, you travel, and you do it again.
Shadia Humball and her team didn't just chase one shadow.
This study utilizes data collected over nearly 12 years.
12 years, that is incredible dedication.
Just chasing two minute windows around the world.
It is fundamental though.
Yeah.
Think about the sun's heartbeat.
It isn't the same every single day.
It goes through a cycle, the solar cycle,
which is roughly 11 years long.
Right, solar minimum and solar maximum.
Exactly.
At solar minimum, the sun is relatively quiet.
The magnetic field is organized.
At solar maximum, the magnetic field is a tangled mess.
And the sun is firing off flares left and right.
If you only looked at one eclipse in, say, 2015,
you wouldn't know if what you saw was normal or just
a weird Tuesday.
You need the whole movie, not just a screenshot.
Precisely.
By tracking this over a full 12 year cycle,
have all's team can see the evolution.
They could prove that these structures they found
weren't just accidents.
They were a fundamental part of how the sun works.
OK, so we have the perfect tool, the eclipse.
We have the long-term data, 12 years of chasing shadows
across the globe.
Now let's get to the thing they actually found.
The smoke rings.
The vortex rings.
Use the fancy term if you want, but they look like smoke rings
to me.
The study describes turbulent structures
forming in the corona.
Yes.
And this is a big deal because, for a long time,
the corona was thought to be fairly laminar.
Smooth, flowing in straight lines,
like water in a calm river.
But what they found was turbulence,
eddies, swirls, and specifically these vortex rings.
Explain the physics of a vortex ring to us.
How do you get a donut shaped made of gas?
It is a fluid dynamics classic.
A vortex ring forms when a fast-moving slug of fluid
pushes through a stationary or slower-moving fluid.
The friction at the edges basically rolls the fluid back on itself.
Like blowing a smoke ring, you push the smoke out quickly
through your lips and the air in the room
derags on the edges and it spins into a donut.
Exactly.
Seeing this on the sun tells us something very specific.
There is a massive speed difference involved.
There is a pulse of energy pushing plasma
through the atmosphere at incredible speeds.
And the study also mentions rolling waves.
They compared them to clouds on Earth.
Yes, likely Kelvin Humboldt's instabilities.
You have seen these before.
Have you ever looked up at the sky and seen a cloud layer
that looks like ocean waves breaking?
Like a perfect row of surfer curls.
Yeah, they look like a vango painting.
It's super trippy.
Yeah, that happens when two layers of air
are moving past each other in different speeds.
The sheer force rolls the boundary up into a wave.
Finding that on the sun is remarkable.
It means the solar atmosphere isn't just hot gas hanging there.
It has weather.
It has wind shear.
It has storms.
Makes the sun feel so much more tangible.
It's not just a light source.
It's a place, a place with really, really violent weather.
Violent is the right word.
Because remember, on Earth, those clouds are water vapor.
On the sun, they're a million degree plasma.
Which leads me to the next big question.
On Earth, storms are caused by hot air meeting
cold air or high pressure meeting low pressure.
What causes a storm on a star?
What is the engine creating these smoke rings?
That is the core discovery of this paper.
They trace these smoke rings back to their source.
And the culprit is a structure called a prominence.
A prominence.
I've seen pictures of these.
They look like big loops sticking out of the sun,
like handlebars.
A good visual.
A prominence is a large, bright feature
extending outward from the sun's surface.
It is anchored to the sun, usually in a loop shape.
But here is the thing that makes them chaotic.
They are cold.
OK, you keep doing this.
If you say cold when we are talking about the sun, explain.
It is all relative.
The outer atmosphere where these things live
is bafflingly hot.
It is over a million degrees Celsius.
OK.
But the prominence, the material inside that loop,
it is much, much cooler, maybe tens of thousands of degrees.
So it's basically an ice cube.
In that specific environment, yes.
It is a dense, heavy, cool iceberg of plasma
sitting right in the middle of a sparse million-degree furnace.
And I'm guessing those two things don't get along.
Nature hates a sharp gradient.
Nature wants equilibrium.
When you have cool, dense matter right next to hot, thin matter,
you create an incredibly unstable boundary.
It's a plash.
It is a war zone of physics.
The study explains that where these two extremes meet,
you get sharp changes in temperature and density.
This creates massive instability.
The hot plasma tries to rush in.
The cold plasma is heavy and tries to fall.
The magnetic fields are twisting to hold it all together.
It sounds like a pressure cooker lid rattling before it blows.
That is a great analogy.
And when it rattles, it creates turbulence.
It sheds these layers.
The instability triggers the formation of these vortex
rings.
It basically peels them off the main structure.
So the smoke rings are essentially
the exhaust from this clash between the hot atmosphere
and the cool loop.
Exactly.
They're the visible sign of the sun
trying to balance out this massive temperature difference.
OK.
So we have the storm.
We have the smoke rings forming.
But usually, turbulence just stops.
If I stir my coffee, the swirl lasts for a few seconds
and then friction kills it.
Right.
In normal fluid dynamics, viscosity
eats up the energy.
The turbulence dissipates into heat.
But Hubble's team says these things don't just sit there
and fade out.
They travel.
They do.
And this is the part that connects the sun to us.
There's a quote from Hubble in the notes.
For the first time, we were able to watch these turbulent
structures form near the sun and then follow them
as they float outward.
Float outward.
That implies survival.
But how did they track them?
You just said the eclipse only lasts a few minutes.
You can't watch a smoke ring travel a million miles
in four minutes.
No, you can't.
This is where they had to get really clever
and combine their ancient eclipse method
with the absolute cutting edge.
They took the high resolution images
from the ground, the eclipse data,
and they overlaid them with data from space.
Which satellite?
The Parker Solar Probe.
Specifically, the whisper instrument.
The wide-fueled imager for solar probe.
The Parker Solar Probe.
That's the one that's basically hugging the sun, right?
Yeah, it is the fastest man-bait object in history.
And it is actively diving into the solar corona.
It is flying through the very atmosphere
we are discussing right now.
That is bonkers.
So they take the picture from Earth
and they take the picture from the probe inside the corona.
And they match the structures.
They saw the exact same vortex rings in the eclipse data
and in the space-based images.
That is the smoking gun.
It is.
And it proves that these features remain intact
over enormous distances.
They survive the journey away from the sun,
moving out into the solar system.
How does a swirl of gas hold its shape
for millions of miles?
Magnetism.
If this were just normal gas, it would dissipate.
Okay.
But this is plasma.
It is highly charged.
It carries a magnetic field.
These vortex rings are essentially magnetic capsules.
The magnetic field locks the plasma in place,
holding the shape together as it travels through the vacuum.
So it's not just a puff of smoke.
It's a magnetic bullet.
That is a very evocative and somewhat concerning way
to put it, but yes.
Which brings us to the part of the show where we ask,
so what?
Why should you or I care?
I'm sitting here on Earth drinking my coffee.
Why do I care if the sun is firing magnetic bullets
into space?
Because you are in the line of fire.
Comforting.
We need to talk about the solar wind.
Okay.
The solar wind, I know it exists.
It's the stuff that makes the northern lights, right?
That is the beautiful side of it, yes.
The solar wind is a constant stream of charged particles
flowing out from the sun in all directions.
It fills the entire solar system.
But we have always had a really hard time
explaining exactly how it gets so fast.
It actually accelerates as it moves away from the sun.
Which makes no sense at all.
Gravity should be pulling it back and slowing it down.
Exactly.
Something is pushing it.
Something is adding energy to the flow.
And let me guess, the smoke rings.
The smoke rings.
The study suggests that this turbulence,
these vortex rings and rolling waves,
plays a key role in accelerating the solar winds.
They're like little booster rockets.
They're packets of energy and momentum.
As they travel outward, they transfer that energy
to the surrounding particles,
kicking the wind up to higher and higher speeds.
So the storms on the sun are basically the engine
that drives the wind that hits Earth.
Correct.
And that wind isn't just a gentle breeze.
When it hits Earth, we call it space weather.
Space weather.
It always sounds like a bad sci-fi movie title to me,
but it's a real problem for our tech, isn't it?
It is a critical vulnerability for modern society.
When the solar wind is turbulent,
when it is full of these dense magnetic structures,
it impacts Earth's magnetic field.
It compresses it.
It shakes it.
And that shaking breaks things.
It disrupts things heavily.
The study explicitly lists the consequences.
First up, satellites.
GPS.
GPS.
Your phone knows exactly where you are
because it receives a signal from a satellite
with nanosecond precision.
That signal has to pass through the ionosphere,
the upper part of our atmosphere.
And when a solar storm hits?
The ionosphere gets churned up.
It gets thicker in places, thinner in others.
It delays the signal.
And a delay means an error.
A delay means your phone thinks the satellite
is further away than it actually is.
Suddenly, your GPS says you're driving in the middle of a lake.
Which is annoying for me to try and mind a coffee shop,
but probably catastrophic for a self-driving car
or an airplane landing in fog.
Exactly.
Then there is radio communication.
High-frequency radios used by airlines.
And the military can be completely blacked out.
And the big one, the power grid.
A grid.
Yeah.
This is the black swan event everyone fears in this field.
Explain how a storm on the sun turns off the lights in Chicago.
It is basic physics.
A changing magnetic field creates an electric current.
That's literally how a generator works.
When a solar storm hits Earth,
it causes our planet's magnetic field to fluctuate wildly.
It wiggles.
And that wiggling field induces electrical currents
in any long conductor on the ground.
Like power lines?
Like power lines.
Yeah.
Oil pipelines, undersea internet cables.
Suddenly you have massive amounts of uncontrolled electricity
flowing through wires that were definitely not designed for it.
And the transformers explode.
They melt.
It has happened before.
The 1989 Quebec blackout is the classic example.
Six million people lost power in 90 seconds
because of a solar storm.
And that was 1989.
We didn't have nearly as much tech dependency then.
Exactly.
We are far more vulnerable now.
So bringing it back to the shorty of Hubble's research,
this isn't just about finding cool shapes in the corona.
It is about prediction.
Right.
Because if we know how these things form in the first place.
Exactly.
Hubble says, understanding where this turbulence comes from
is key to predicting those impacts.
If we know that a specific type of prominence
interacting with the corona in a specific way
generates these vortex rings.
We can spot it before it hits us.
We can look at the sun and say, OK,
see that loop on the eastern edge?
It's unstable.
It's pumping out turbulence.
We're going to see a spike in solar wind velocity in three days.
And that actually gives us time to prepare.
We can put satellites in safe mode.
We can decouple parts of the power grid
to prevent a cascading failure.
We can reroute flights away from the poles.
It moves us from just reacting to disaster
to actually forecasting it.
It turns a potential disaster into a manageable event.
That is the ultimate goal of all this space weather research.
It is wild to think about the chain of events here.
We started with a shadow, a moon blocking the sun.
Step one.
Then we saw the threads, then the prominence, the cold loop.
Step two.
Then the clash, the temperature fight
that creates the smoke rings.
Step three.
Then the rings travel, boost the solar wind, fly across 93 million
miles of empty space.
And potentially knock out your Wi-Fi?
The butterfly effect, but with a million degree plasma.
The plasma effect.
I like that.
You know, this whole investigation has really
changed how I look at the sun.
I mean, usually I just try not to get a sunburn.
I don't think about the machinery of it all.
It is humbling.
I often think about the dual nature of the sun.
It is the giver of life.
Without it, we are just a frozen rock in the dark.
Photosynthesis, warmth, rain.
It all comes from that energy.
But at the same time, it is a monster.
It is a source of constant violent change.
It is a nuclear bomb that literally never stops exploding.
And the eclipse is the only time we really
get to peak under the hood.
It's the only time the glare stops long enough for us
to see the gears turning.
To see the vortex rings spinning out.
It reminds us that we are living next to a very active,
very powerful neighbor.
A neighbor that throws wild parties
and occasionally tosses a smoke ring over the fence.
And we just have to hope our windows don't break.
Every slicey.
So here is the thought I want to leave you with, listener.
We are moving toward a time where solar eclipses
are going to happen again.
The next time you see a picture of one, maybe on your feed,
or maybe you are lucky enough to be
in the path of totality, don't just look at the beauty.
Don't just look at the halo.
Yeah, don't just admire the diamond ring effect.
Look closer, look at the texture.
Ask yourself, what invisible storms are rolling off
that edge right now?
What magnetic vortexes are spinning out into the dark
headed right toward us?
It is a beautiful view, but there is
a massive amount of physics happening in the dark.
It's not just a shadow, it's a laboratory.
And thanks to researchers like Shadia Habal,
we are finally learning how to read the data.
Always more to learn out there.
Always, thanks for joining us on this trip
to the edge of the sun.
It was a pleasure.
We'll see you on the next investigation, stay curious.
Thanks for joining us on this trip to the edge of the sun.
Let's jump.
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