The world’s most powerful solar telescope has captured new images of our sun’s surface in great detail, as the sun’s middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the chromosphere, looks like a coarse woolen carpet.
The plasma flames in the image above can be seen as hairs flowing into the halo from what looks like a honeycomb which can be easily seen in the image below. These granular bubbles are known as granules, and each is about 1,600 km wide.
Each of the images is about 82,500 kilometers wide, and is equal to a single digit percentage (meaning a number smaller than ten) of the total diameter of the Sun.
To clarify the enormous magnitude of these images with all their dimensions and elements, astronomers placed our planet above the image to measure on its basis.
This stunning feat marks the first anniversary of the Inouye Solar Telescope – the most powerful instrument of its kind – and the culmination of 25 years of careful planning.
The chromosphere, which lies below the sun’s corona, is only visible during a total solar eclipse, when it forms a red rim around the obscured sun. But new technology has changed that.
We’ve never looked at the sun so closely without an eclipse, as the Inoue telescope is able to see features inside the sun’s chromosphere as small as the island of Manhattan.
And last year, when the semi-complete telescope released its first images, heliophysicist Jeff Kuhn called it “the greatest leap in humanity’s ability to study the Sun” since Galileo’s time.
Today, says astronomer and space telescope Matt Mountain, president of the Universities Association for Research in Astronomy (AURA), we have begun “a new era in the study of heliophysics”.
The insights gained from this new perspective will help scientists predict and prepare for solar storms that could send a tsunami of hot, magnetic plasma from the sun’s corona to Earth, which could cause power outages and internet outages for months worldwide.
“We thank the people of Hawaii for making it possible for us to work from this wonderful site, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Congress for their continued support, and the Inoue Solar Telescope team, many of whose members have been tirelessly devoted to the most,” Mountain said in a new statement. of a decade to this transformative project,” Mountain said in a recent announcement.
The Inui Solar Telescope is built on Maui’s Halyakala volcano, a volcano that is culturally and spiritually important to Native Hawaiians. The National Science Foundation is proud to have contributed Hawaiian-made instruments to all phases of the telescope’s construction, though some natives say the instrument still appears to be an insult to white colonists.
Another huge telescope to be built on the extinct volcano Mwanekea encountered great resistance from Native Hawaiians who did not want to desecrate their sacred site for Western scientific purposes.
Long before the time of Galileo, indigenous peoples around the world were using the sun, moon and stars to better understand our place in the universe. Today, the Inoue Solar Telescope gives us an unprecedented glimpse into the center of our solar system, but we must not lose sight of the stargazers before us. They are close to the distance between us and the stars.
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