New images captured by the world's most powerful solar telescope have revealed something that was hiding in plain sight on the sun for 150 years: thousands of tiny whirlpools twisting across our star's surface. The ultra-detailed observations could help to explain some of the sun's most violent behavior as well as hint at the answer to a long-standing solar mystery. Researchers captured the swirls using the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and then compared the images against computer simulations of the sun's visible surface, called the photosphere. Latest Videos From Live Science Watch full video here:A time-lapse view of the Inouye telescope's obseravtions of the sun. (Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS)The resulting time-lapse footage from the telescope is unlike anything solar physicists have captured before.