The first images from a new solar telescope in Hawaii offer stunning views of the turbulent surface of the sun.
The pictures released by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope—perched on the 3,055-metre summit of Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui—are the highest-resolution images ever of our solar system’s life-giving star.
Close-fitting patterns made up of cell-like plasma structures the size of the state of Texas are shown jostling and roiling on the sun’s 5,600° C surface, the end product of a convection process that delivers the solar plasma from the star’s nuclear-furnace 15,000,000° C interior.
Plasma is a hot ionized gas that is considered one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas.
“It is literally the greatest leap in humanity’s ability to study the sun from the ground since Galileo’s time. It’s a big deal,” professor Jeff Kuhn, of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Institute for Astronomy, said in a UH news release.
Kuhn, who works with the new four-metre solar telescope, said new infrared instruments that are not yet online in the observatory will allow even more detailed analysis and measurement of the solar corona’s magnetic field and will allow scientists to predict solar flares and storms. Such activity, which releases huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation, can have a serious effect on communications satellites and air travel and can even shut down electrical grids on Earth.
Video of NSF Inouye Solar Telescope First Light Image Animated (Small Field of View)
National Solar Observatory
“These instruments use sensitive infrared technology and complex optics that reveal sunspots and small magnetic features, and how their magnetism reaches into space. With these new tools we expect to learn how the Sun interacts with the Earth,” Kuhn said.
NSF spokesperson Rob Margetta told the Straight by phone that the solar-telescope project commenced design work about two decades ago, with construction on Haleakala getting underway in 2012. “It was a pretty big engineering challenge,” Margetta said. “It’s mission is to operate for 50 years, but it could last beyond that.”
