Late last year, the sun began a new cycle of activity. It started slowly, but there were a handful of sunspots in early 2020.
Conveniently, Daniel K. Innoye Solar Telescope (or DKIST) began operations in the same period. And when you take a 4-meter telescope to the top of the Haleakali volcano on Maui Island and point it at the sun, you know you’ll find amazing images of our nearest star.*.
On January 28, 2020, a sunspot popped up on the solar surface, and DKIST took a look at it. To celebrate the observation paper being published about the observatory, they published an image of a sunspot that just melted the brain:
Yeah, and I can add.
That image shows the area of the sun at a distance of about 16,000 kilometers on one side. Earth is about 13,000 km away for comparison, so it will fit nicely into the image. The resolution is ridiculously extraordinary; 20 km on one side. As small areas as can be seen. This is the distance you can cover on the bike in an hour or two, assuming you will not evaporate.
This image is not a snapshot. He used what he called Skeleton Reconstruction. The Earth’s atmosphere always comes from above, and the small parcel of air acts like a lens, bending the incoming light in this way and that. When you take prolonged exposure, it smells like movement images, reducing resolution. There are various ways to compensate for this – such as adaptive optics – and DKIST uses them, but they also take very short exposures to stabilize air movements.
Some parts of each image are blurred, so enough images are taken that eventually you get a clean shot of each part of the image, and then you can recreate the whole contact from a clean contact. All of this happens automatically several times per second, and the result is that the resulting resolution of DKIST is as good as you can theoretically get from a telescope of this size.
By the way, here was the image of Sunspot No Clearly we did our big on the sun last week. It was much larger than the earth.
Sunspots have two main regions: dark Ombra, And lighter Penumbra Around him. You can see it very clearly in the picture above. Both have a ton of structures that are hard to see in most ground-based images, so DKIST will provide solar astronomers with a lot of fun sharp data to analyze.
And only time, because the sun is really increasing activity on its surface. It comes in an 11-year cycle in which the solar magnetic field becomes stronger over the next five years or so – it is predicted to reach a peak in mid-2025, and then weaken again. Activity has also increased significantly in the past year; The big sunspot shows it last week.
I made a video showing a week of activity on the sun around the January sunspot appearing and made a week focusing on the big sunspots we gave last week. The video uses observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory at a wavelength of 13.1 nanometers where ultraviolet solar activity is easy to see.
In the first half (020 seconds, from January 2020) you can see light activity, one of the strongest spot seen by DKIST in the north. In the second part (20-40 seconds, November / December 2020), the latest large space is rotated to the left and you can see much more activity, with magnetic field lines warming the plasma looping and turning behind the sun. Surface.
Magnetic field lines can create these sunspots – they prevent the hot plasma from sinking back into the sun, which cools it, so it looks darker – but they can also explode and blow out their stored energy, flames and coronal mass. Can create ejections. Effects on Earth. We need to better understand these events, and the super-resolution images that DKIST provides are an excellent tool for that.
I really look forward to seeing what else this telescope can do. The sun is a surprisingly complex and beautiful star. I never get tired of watching it up close.
*You also produce The whole heatIs, which takes Lots of clever tech to get rid of.
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