The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii has produced the highest resolution video of the Sun’s surface ever created, revealing what looks like exploding bits of caramelized popcorn covering the star at the heart of our Solar System.

Why am I hungry now?
A telescope in Hawaii has produced the highest resolution video of the Suns surface ever created, revealing what looks like exploding bits of caramelized popcorn covering the star at the heart of our Solar System.
The trippy image comes from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which first started taking images of the Sun in December from Hawaiis Haleakal mountain. The observatory is hailed as the largest and most powerful solar telescope in the world. When its fully completed this summer, the telescope will be tasked with intensely studying the Suns magnetic field to learn more about why our Sun behaves in the weird ways that it does.
To create the molten-looking video above, the telescope observed the Sun for a total of 10 minutes. The popping cells in the video are plasma rising up out of the Sun, cooling off, and then retreating back downward. The video is so high resolution that the image shows details and figures just 18 miles across. But the scale of the image is still quite extreme. Each kernel in the video is about the size of Texas, and the entire area covered is 11,800 miles by 6,700 miles.
Its a good time to be studying the Sun right now, with numerous instruments on the ground and in space designed to figure out more about our star. NASA launched its Parker Solar Probe in 2018, which will get closer to the Sun than any human-made object has ever been. And next week, Europe is launching its own Sun-bound spacecraft, the Solar Orbiter, to learn more about the Suns mysterious poles.