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. Previous observations with the telescope found the sun's surface to be a patchwork of granular structures each about the size of France. Those images picked out details as small as 30km across, but the latest are right at the limit of the telescope's capability. In the latest images, the small whirlpool-like structures on the sun's surface were identified as signatures of what scientists call Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHIs). This sets up small disturbances in the sun's plasma that grow into spiralling vortices that look like breaking waves.