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The latest images of the Sun taken by the GREGOR telescope show its popcorn-like surface and a magnetic field in high resolution. The telescope is the largest in Europe and is located at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands. The telescope was recently upgraded, helping it produce spectacular images of the Sun’s surface.
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The GREGOR telescope was inaugurated in 2012 and upgrade work began in 2018. The update involved optics, alignment, instrumentation, mechanical improvements for vibration reduction, updated control systems, and building improvements, among other things. Measuring 1.5 m in diameter and having an optical footprint of 1.44 m, it enables scientists to resolve structures on the Sun as small as 50 km at 400 nm.
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There is not much information about the Sun’s magnetic field, and with the latest images, it will help scientists better understand the solar surface. It will help you to much better protect satellites and our planet from solar activities. The latest images captured a tiny fraction of the Sun’s gigantic surface, which is 8.50,000 miles in diameter. For example, it was like clearly seeing a small needle on a soccer field from a distance of one kilometer. The telescope also captured a sunspot in high resolution at a wavelength of 430 nm.
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One of GREGOR’s drawbacks in the past was that its image quality did not reach the theoretical limit, partly because there was a risk with unproven technologies, such as silicon carbide mirrors, which could not be polished well enough, and partly due to the design. problems. But that has now been solved by replacing the silicon carbide mirrors with mirrors made from Zerodur, which can be polished to the required quality, and redesigning the optics of the AO relay.
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‘Very risky project’
The GREGOR 1.5-meter solar telescope was built by a German consortium under the leadership of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg, Germany. One of the astrophysicists working on the project said it was very risky because it normally takes years to update something like GREGOR, but the team was able to pull it off in just one year.
(Image credit: KIS / Website)
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