The world’s most powerful solar telescope has captured the face of our star in stunning detail. The resolution of the image is only 18 km and it shows the middle layer of the solar atmosphere.
The photo shows bright “hairs” of fiery plasma pouring from pine-like pores into the Sun’s corona. These bulging bubbles are called granules and are about 1,600 kilometers across.
Each image captures a region approximately 82,500 km wide. To better understand the enormous scale, astronomers have included our planet in the picture.
This incredible achievement comes on the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of the Inouye Solar Telescope. The telescope has been under construction for 25 years and is currently the most powerful solar telescope in the world.
The sun’s chromosphere is located below the crown (corona); It is usually only visible during a total solar eclipse when it forms a red arc around the darkened star. However, new technology has changed all that.
We have never seen the light source of the solar system so close. The Inouye Telescope can even see features as small as Manhattan in the Sun’s chromosphere.
When the near-complete telescope took its first photos last year, solar physicist Jeff Kuhn called the achievement “humanity’s biggest leap in the study of the Sun since the age of Galileo.”
And now, astronomer and space telescope scientist Matt Mountain notes, “we’ve cut the ribbon on a new era of solar physics.”
As a result, scientists have new opportunities to predict solar storms; Powerful solar storms can cause serious damage to our technology.
“Special thanks to the people of Hawaii, where this telescope operates, the National Science Foundation and the US Congress for their support,” says Mountain.
The Inouye Solar Telescope is built on the Haleakala volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, which is a sacred site for the native Hawaiians. According to the National Science Foundation, locals were also involved in the construction of the telescope, but some locals still perceive this instrument as an insult from the white colonizers.
Another large telescope planned to be built on the extinct volcano Maunakea is facing greater opposition from native Hawaiians. The locals do not want their sacred site to be used for the purposes of Western science.
However, it is clear that Inouye’s solar telescope is a major scientific achievement for modern astronomy. This telescope will allow us to study our mother star much better.
Prepared according to nso.edu and ScienceAlert
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