What does the sun look like? Before you go and blind yourself by looking at our nearest star with your naked eyes, do yourself a favour and instead check out this image—the most detailed ever.
Revealing unprecedented detail of the sun’s surface, the image marks “first light” at the National Science Foundation’s new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on Haleakalā in Hawaii. A 13 foot/four-meter solar ground-based telescope, DKIST could signal a new era for solar science when it officially begins its work on July 1, 2020 and, hopefully, will lead to a leap forward in scientists’ understanding the sun and its impacts on our planet.
You can download the incredible image in high resolutions to keep, but the mesmerising videos are also worth a watch.
[id=14]
What is the sun?
The sun is a star 93 million miles from Earth that burns around five million tons of hydrogen fuel every second. It’s about half way through its life; it’s existed for five billion years and has another 4.5 billion years to go before it packs up.
What does the image show?
These first images from the DKIST show a close-up view of the sun’s surface, notably a pattern of turbulent “boiling” plasma that covers the entire star. The cell-like structures are violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. The hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of these cells, cools off, then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection.
What is the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope?
It’s the world’s largest solar telescope, mirror-wise, and it also has the largest aperture of any solar telescope. Built by NSF’s National Solar Observatory and managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), the DKIST sits atop the summit of the 10,000-foot Haleakalā volcano on the Island of Maui, Hawaii. Since it’s pointing at the sun, its real trick is in how its optics are cooled. Ice is produced at the observatory at night, and there are seven miles of piping to distribute coolant throughout. There are cooling plates on the dome enclosing the telescope that stabilize the temperature around it, while a liquid-cooled metal “donut” blocks most of the sunlight’s energy from the main mirror.
“We will be able to perform the most challenging measurements of the sun,” said Thomas Rimmele, director of the DKIST. “After more than 20 years of work by a large team devoted to designing and building a premier solar research observatory, we are close to the finish line.”
Formerly known as the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope, DKIST was renamed to honour Daniel K. Inouye, a late US senator from Hawaii, who was a tireless proponent of science, technology, engineering and math.
What are ‘space weather’ and ‘solar storms?’
Space weather, unlike meteorology on Earth, is all a bit of a mystery. The sun’s energy radiates into space in every direction, and the tiny fraction that hits Earth makes life possible. Our planet—and all the other planets in the solar system—essentially exist within its outer atmosphere. However, when the sun spits-out more energy than normal—because of activity on its surface—it can cause problems. If the solar wind from the sun that envelopes Earth contains more charged particles than usual, it’s called a solar storm, and it can affect satellite communications and bring down power grids, causing long-lasting blackouts and disabling technologies such as GPS.
The effect of space weather can also be seen as a display of aurora, also known as the northern lights or southern lights in Earth’s polar regions. What you’re seeing is Earth’s defence mechanism against space weather.
What else will scientists learn from the DKIST?
We’ve known about the solar wind since the 1950s, but many of the sun’s most vital processes continue to confound scientists. Hence the need for the DKIST. “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,” said Matt Mountain president of AURA, which manages the DKIST. “Our predictions lag behind terrestrial weather by 50 years, if not more. 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.” It’s slated to have a lifespan of around 50 years.
The end result could be a more accurate and faster prediction of space weather. For now, the warning time is about 48 minutes, but 48 hours is the ambition, which would help electricity grids to prepare and satellite operators to put their hardware into a safe mode.
How does the sun’s magnetic field work?
“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,” said France Córdova, NSF director. The corona—or crown—is the outer, and hotter, of the sun’s atmosphere. “This telescope will improve our understanding of what drives space weather and ultimately help forecasters better predict solar storms.”
The sun’s magnetic field is key to understanding its physical processes, and so predicting them—and therefore space weather “events.” These first images from the DKIST of the sun’s surface in close-up reveal the motions of the sun’s plasma, which tangle and twist the star’s magnetic fields. That in turn causes space weather and, in some cases, raging solar storms. Inouye should help solar scientists image the sun’s magnetic features and help build a model of its magnetic field. “It’s all about the magnetic field,” said Rimmele. “To unravel the sun’s biggest mysteries, we have to not only be able to clearly see these tiny structures from 93 million miles away but very precisely measure their magnetic field strength and direction near the surface and trace the field as it extends out into the million-degree corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun.”
A new era for solar science?
“It’s an exciting time to be a solar physicist,” said Valentin Pillet, director of NSF’s National Solar Observatory. “The Inouye Solar Telescope will provide remote sensing of the outer layers of the sun and the magnetic processes that occur in them.” The results should complement observations of space weather being made right now by the NASA’s Parker Solar Probe—currently in orbit around the sun—and by the European Space Agency/NASA’s Solar Orbiter, which is due to launch in February 2020.
“This image is just the beginning,” said David Boboltz, program director in NSF’s division of astronomical sciences and who oversees the facility’s construction and operations. “The Inouye Solar Telescope will collect more information about our sun during the first 5 years of its lifetime than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612.”
Ultimately, what solar scientists want these missions to do is to help them understand not just the relationship between the sun and the Earth, but how stars and planets throughout the galaxy are magnetically connected.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes
