Shocking solar spectacle: Telescope reveals close-up look at the Sun

By Dean Murray via SWNS

Jaw-dropping pictures from the world's most powerful solar telescope show the sun in incredible detail.

The new images are from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and depict dramatic larger-than-Earth sunspots - including one shaped like a ghoulish face.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) says the scenes preview the "exciting science underway" at the world’s most powerful ground-based solar telescope, which is on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

They explain the telescope’s unique ability to capture data in unprecedented detail will help solar scientists better understand the sun’s magnetic field and drivers behind solar storms.

The recently inaugurated telescope is in its Operations Commissioning Phase (OCP), a learning and transitioning period during which the observatory is slowly brought up to its full operational capabilities.

The new images feature a variety of sunspots and quiet regions of the sun obtained by the Visible-Broadband Imager (VBI), one of the telescope’s first-generation instruments.

The sunspots pictured are dark and cool regions on the sun’s “surface”, known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields persist.

The pictures make up a small fraction of the data obtained from the Cycle 1 observing window. The Inouye Solar Telescope’s Data Center will continue to calibrate and deliver data to scientists and the public.

As the Inouye Solar Telescope continues to explore the sun, there will be more results from the scientific community – including "spectacular views of our solar system’s most influential celestial body."

Sunspots vary in size, but many are often the size of Earth, if not larger. Complex sunspots or groups of sunspots can be the source of explosive events like flares and coronal mass ejections that generate solar storms.

These energetic and eruptive phenomena influence the outermost atmospheric layer of the sun, the heliosphere, with the potential to impact Earth and our critical infrastructure.

In the quiet regions of the sun, the images show convection cells in the photosphere displaying a bright pattern of hot, upward-flowing plasma (granules) surrounded by darker lanes of cooler, down-flowing solar plasma. In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see dark, elongated fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field accumulations.