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The largest European solar telescope “Gregor” has taken sharp images of the fine structure of the sun. With the device, the researchers were able to resolve details up to 50 kilometers in the sun, announced the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg. That corresponds to a tiny fraction of the sun’s diameter of 1.4 million kilometers. “It’s like seeing a needle on a perfectly sharpened soccer field from a kilometer away.”
The solar telescope is operated by a German consortium under the leadership of KIS and is located at the Teide observatory on the Spanish island of Tenerife. In order to take the high resolution images, the technology had to be completely revised. “In just one year we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality,” said Lucia Kleint, who led the project and the German solar telescopes in Tenerife.
With the telescope’s new optics, scientists could now, for example, examine magnetic fields, turbulence, solar flares and sunspots in detail. “The first images, taken in July 2020, show amazing details of the development of sunspots and complex structures in the solar plasma.”
