A Red Giant star's surface is photographed by an Earth Observatory.

Astronomers spy a red giant's bubbling surface | EarthSky.org

With just a few exceptions, throughout the ages, whether using the eye alone or telescopes, astronomers have seen stars as pinpoints. Stars are really great balls of roiling gases, shining powerfully into space via thermonuclear reactions taking place in their interiors.

 Me, "Just the first of many pictures we will see as telescopes get much more powerful and new instruments are developed to see further."

From article, (With just a few exceptions, throughout the ages, whether using the eye alone or telescopes, astronomers have seen stars as pinpoints. Stars are really great balls of roiling gases, shining powerfully into space via thermonuclear reactions taking place in their interiors. But all stars besides our sun are so very distant that, even with telescopes, we’ve had very few direct glimpses of their surface features. Now, for the first time, astronomers have directly observed granulation patterns, caused by massive convection currents rising from the star’s interior, on the surface of a star outside our solar system. It’s no coincidence the star is a huge one, the aging red giant Pi1 Gruis, whose diameter is about 700 times that of our sun. The astronomers have seen the giant convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star. These new results are being published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

These astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope to make this observation, along with an instrument called PIONIER (Precision Integrated-Optics Near-infrared Imaging ExpeRiment).)

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