The surface of the Sun, it turns out, looks a lot like peanut brittle.
The National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope—located on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, Hawai’i—has produced the highest-resolution photos of our star ever taken.
“Since NSF began work on this ground-based telescope, we have eagerly awaited the first images,” foundation director France Córdova said in a statement.
Released this week, the snapshots show a pattern of turbulent “boiling” plasma covering the entire Sun. The cell-like structures (each about the size of Texas) convect masses of hot solar gas.
“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,” Córdova explained. “This telescope will improve our understanding of what drives space weather and ultimately help forecasters better predict solar storms.”
The Sun has been burning 5 million tons of hydrogen fuel every second for about 5 billion years (and will continue for another 4.5 billion.) All that energy radiates into space—a tiny fraction of which reaches Earth to make life possible.
These bright spots may be at the core of why the solar corona is more than a million degrees (via NSO/NSF/AURA)
Despite our reliance on that giant nuclear reactor in the sky, many of the Sun’s most vital processes remain unknown.
“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,” according to Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which manages the Inouye Solar Telescope.
“Our predictions lag behind terrestrial weather by 50 years, if not more,” he continued. “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.”
Built by NSF’s National Solar Observatory and managed by AURA, the machine combines a 13-foot mirror—the world’s largest for a solar telescope—with viewing conditions 10,000 feet high atop the Haleakala summit.
Moving forward, it will work with space-based solar observation tools like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (currently in orbit around the Sun) and the soon-to-be-launched European Space Agency/NASA Solar Orbiter.
“These first images are just the beginning,” David Boboltz, program director in NSF’s division of astronomical sciences, said in a statement.
Over the next six months, a team of scientists, engineers, and technicians will continue testing and commissioning the scope to prepare it for use by international researchers.
“The Inouye Solar Telescope will collect more information about our Sun during the first five years of its lifetime than all of the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the Sun in 1612,” Boboltz added.
More on Geek.com:
- Solar Orbiter Will Be Checking Out Sun’s Poles for First Time
- NASA’s Closest-Yet Sun Flyby Sheds Light on Solar Mysteries
- NASA Shares Blazing ‘Pumpkin Sun’ Image Taken by Satellite
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