Watch: This is the most detailed picture of Sun ever
What's the story
The US National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) has captured a groundbreaking image of the Sun.
This is the first image taken by its new Visible Tunable Filter (VTF), an instrument capable of creating a close-up, three-dimensional view of solar activities.
The detailed photograph reveals continent-size dark sunspots on the Sun's inner atmosphere, each measuring 10km per pixel.
These mark areas of intense magnetic activity where solar flares and coronal mass ejections are likely to occur.
Power
How powerful are CMEs?
CMEs are massive clouds of ionized gas/plasma, and magnetic fields that erupt from the Sun's outer atmosphere. "A solar storm in the 1800s reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations," said Friedrich Woeger, an NSF Inouye Solar Telescope instrument program scientist.
Solar dynamics
Solar cycles and magnetic activity
The Sun works on an 11-year cycle of high and low magnetic activity. The current period, called solar maximum, will continue for several months.
During this time, the Sun's magnetic poles flip and more sunspots appear on its surface.
This phase offers a unique opportunity for DKIST to test its instruments with stunning images of the Sun's dynamic surface.
Nature
Understanding sunspots
Sunspots are commonly called "magnetic plugs," or tangles in the star's complex magnetic fields that block heat from reaching the surface.
They show up darker in pictures and are cooler than their surroundings, but still hotter than any oven on Earth.
The Sun's texture comes from different densities and temperatures within its surface layers, much like an onion.
Instrument
VTF: The heart of the Inouye Solar Telescope
The VTF, an imaging spectro-polarimeter, filters measurable wavelengths one by one with an etalon - two glass plates that are separated by microns.
This instrument takes hundreds of images through different filters in some seconds and combines them into a three-dimensional snapshot.
"The significance of the achievement is such that one could argue the VTF is Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place," said Dr. Matthias Schubert, project scientist at Institute for Solar Physics.