Astronomers have released some of the most detailed images of the sun's surface yet, revealing features as small as 18 miles across. The images were captured by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope located at around 10,000 feet above sea level near the summit of Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii.
The telescope, which was brought online in December, is the largest solar observatory in the world and features a 4-meter (13-foot) mirror that was able to image the pattern of turbulent, "boiling" plasma covering the sun some 93 million miles from Earth. The visible cell-like structures in the image are each around the size of Texas, where the hot plasma rises before cooling off and sinking below the surface in the darker parts of the image in a process known as convection, which transports heat from inside the sun to its surface.
"We can now share these images and videos, which are the most detailed of our sun to date. NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope will be able to map the magnetic fields within the sun’s corona, where solar eruptions occur that can impact life on Earth," said France Córdova, NSF director. "This telescope will improve our understanding of what drives space weather and ultimately help forecasters better predict solar storms."
The sun burns around 5 million tons of hydrogen fuel every second, sends out its energy into space in every direction. The tiny sliver of the sun's output that hits Earth is what makes life possible. Studying the sun's output or "space weather" can allow scientists to better predict problems here at home. Magnetic eruptions on the sun can result in explosive phenomena like solar flares that hurl its energy through the solar system and impact impact all sorts of electronics on our planet, which can disrupt air travel, satellites and even bring down power grids.
“On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately, and space weather just isn’t there yet,” said Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which manages the Inouye Solar Telescope. “Our predictions lag behind terrestrial weather by 50 years, if not more. What we need is to grasp the underlying physics behind space weather, and this starts at the sun, which is what the Inouye Solar Telescope will study over the next decades.”
David Boboltz, a program director in NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences who oversees the facility’s construction and operations said these images were just the beginning.
"Over the next six months, the Inouye telescope’s team of scientists, engineers and technicians will continue testing and commissioning the telescope to make it ready for use by the international solar scientific community," said Boboltz. "The Inouye Solar Telescope will collect more information about our sun during the first 5 years of its lifetime than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612."
Photo Credit: NSO/AURA/NSF