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Newly released images of the sun, captured by the world’s largest solar telescope, show the surface of our nearest star with unprecedented details, shedding light on its fiery complexity.
This image was first taken by the new visibility adjustable filter, or VTF, of the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. The instrument can build a three-dimensional view more than ever before about what is happening on the surface of the sun, according to a news release.
The close-up reveals clusters of continent-sized dark solar spots near the center of the atmosphere inside the sun, at a scale of 6.2 miles (10 km) per pixel.
These wounds mark areas of intense magnetic activity that are likely to cause solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. Coronal mass emissions are large clouds of plasma and ionized gases called magnetic fields that erupt from the outside air of the sun.
Such detailed images taken in early December provide an important way for scientists to learn and predict potentially dangerous solar climates, according to Friedrich Woeger, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope Instrument program scientist.
“The solar storms in the 1800s (the Carrington event) were so energetic that it reportedly caused a fire at the telegraph station,” Woger said. “We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they affect our technology and ultimately our lives.”
These energetic explosions from the sun interact with our planet’s own electromagnetic fields, he explained, and could lead to obstacles to major infrastructure such as the power grid and satellite-powered communications networks.
The sun passes periods of high and low magnetic activity in an 11-year cycle. In October, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the International Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced that the sun, known as the solar largest, would reach its peak of activity. At peak times, the solar magnetic poles will turn over, and more sun spots will appear on its surface.
The maximum is expected to last for several months, making it a fitting time for Inoueso’s telescope to enhance equipment testing with spectacular images of the dynamic surface of the sun.
Like boiling soup on a stove, heat escapes the nucleus of the sun and rises to its surface through the movement of the fluid, says Mark Miche, a research scientist at the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Misch was not involved in the research.
Sunspots are like “magnetic plugs” or tangles of the complex magnetic field of stars, which can prevent heat from reaching the surface, Misch said. For this reason, sun spots that emit light more than other areas of the sun appear darker in the image and cooler than their surroundings. Nevertheless, the Sunspot is “hotter than any oven on the planet,” he added.
The apparent texture of the sun comes from the various densities and temperatures within the surface with layers similar to onion. By “tuning” them to different wavelengths, or colors like radio tuners, VTF provides a way to probe these different layers and observe what’s going on between them, Miesch said.
In other words, images from a personal camera use light that contains multiple wavelengths simultaneously, while VTF is a type of imaging classification electrode meter that filters measurable wavelengths one by one.
To achieve this filtering, the instrument uses etalons – two glass plates separated by simply microns.
“The principle is different from the principle of noise-cancelling headphones. If two waves of the same wavelength travel in the same or intersecting path, they can interact with each other and cancel each other or strengthen each other,” Woger said. “The light waves trapped between these two plates interfere with the distance between the plates, passing the exact ‘color’ of the light, and choosing which color to cancel. ”
In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images via different filters and combines them into three-dimensional snapshots.
Researchers can then use the resulting view to study temperature, pressure, velocity and magnetic field structure in different layers of the solar atmosphere.
“Looking at these first spectral scans was a surreal moment, and this is not something that can be achieved just like any other instrument on the telescope,” said Dr. Stacey Sueka, senior optical engineer at the National Solar Observatory, in a statement.
The imaging spectrometer represents the culmination of over a decade of development.
Located at the NSF’s National Solar Observatory and at the top of Maui’s 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) Haleakala Volcano, the VTF itself spans multiple stories of the Noue Solar Telescope.
After the VTF was designed and constructed by the German Institute of Solar Physics, parts of the instrument were shipped to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean oceans, and then reassembled like a “bottle ship.”
The team hopes the tool will work perfectly and will be available by 2026.
“The importance of technical achievements is that it is easy to assert that the VTF is the heart of the Inoue solar telescope, and ultimately it is be-hit in its eternal place,” said Dr. Matthias Schubert, a VTF project scientist at the Institute of Solar Physics.
The Solar Telescope is one of several other recent efforts by scientists to better understand the sun and its storm weather patterns, including the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA, launched in 2020, and the Parker Solar Probe from NASA, the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun.