The beautiful recent imagery of a massive dark spot on the sun looks like a blazing flower or heart.
The sunspot is about 10,000 miles long, where intense magnetic forces meet hot gases rising up from inside. That's large enough that there's a wiggle room on our planet.
On January 28, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the world's biggest solar observatory, filmed the phenomena in unparalleled depth. National Science Foundation, which operates the telescope, released the image and a video of the sunspot on Friday.
"The sunspot image achieves a spatial resolution about 2.5 times higher than ever previously achieved, showing magnetic structures as small as 20 kilometers on the surface of the sun," Thomas Rimmele, associate director at the NSF's National Solar Observatory, which operates the telescope, said in a press release.
The magnetic field of the sun is so strong that it reduces the air pressure, which in turn lowers the temperature, sunspots shape. The dark spot in this instance is a cool 7,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The flower-petal-like streaks extend away from the dark spot through the contact between the magnetic fields and hot gases that bubble out from below the atmosphere.
This roiling motion is apparent in the video below. It absorbs around one-and-a-half minutes of solar activity in real-time, squeezed into four seconds only. The frame is around twelve thousand miles long.
Inouye will help forecast the sun's violent eruptions
When it announced its first findings in January, the Inouye telescope created a splash. While the telescope had not been completed yet, the first sun pictures were sharper than those of any previous telescope.
Scientists could help uncover the mystery of space weather with this strong lens and also forecast solar events that could be hazardous to humans.
That's because within the outer limits of the sun's atmosphere lies the whole solar system. In a continuous stream called the solar storm, magnetic, electrically charged ions from the sun continuously wash over the planets. If it communicates with the Earth's atmosphere, this magnetic stream causes auroras. Violent sun blasts, though, emit bursts of electrically charged particles that can damage sensitive technologies.
Scientists may begin to forecast them by using Inoye to research the dynamics of these incidents.
Inouye may also help answer a big mystery: why the corona of the sun is up to 500 times hotter than its surface. Since the 1940s, astronomers have been trying to recognize this phenomenon.
Construction on the telescope was expected to be finished in June of this year but it was moved back to 2021 by the pandemic.
"The start of telescope operations has been slightly delayed due to the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic," David Boboltz, NSF's program director for Inouye, said in the release.
But he added that "this image represents an early preview of the unprecedented capabilities that the facility will bring to bear on our understanding of the sun."
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