The world's biggest solar telescope has captured the stunning details of the Sun's surface, showing sunspots and intense magnetic activity. The newly released image comes as the Sun moves towards its most active phase of its 11-year solar cycle.
The image was released by Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii.
It is the first image captured with the US National Science Foundation's new Visible Tunable Filter (VTF). The high-resolution photograph, taken in early December, shows a collection of enormous sunspots only 10 kilometres apart in size but spanning thousands of miles. The image showed sunspots, each about the size of a continent on Earth.
Scientists from the International Solar Cycle Prediction Panel, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in October that the sun reached the solar maximum or peak of activity. The sun's magnetic poles reverse during the peak, causing more sunspots to show up on its surface.
These sunspots are cooler, active areas on the Sun that can cause big solar explosions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). When these solar outbursts take place, they shoot out charged particles into space, and if these particles reach Earth, they can disrupt satellites, cause power outages or affect GPS and phone signals.
Friedrich Woeger, the instrument program scientist at the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope, said, "A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations. We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives."
Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that sunspots were like magnetic plugs blocking some of the heat coming up to the surface. That's the reason they look darker and are cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface, he added.
He compared these sunspots to an oven. "Even though these sunspots are cooler, they are still hotter than any oven on Earth," he added.
