The Most Powerful Solar Telescope Has Captured New Views of the Sun's Surface

The largest and most powerful ground-based solar telescope on Earth, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope located in Hawaii, has captured a series of spectacular new views of the Sun's surface that show sunspot regions, the roiling convective cells, and the motion of plasma in our star's atmosphere in great detail.

Sunspots are short-lived darker regions on the star where magnetic fields are especially powerful. It is in these sunspots that solar flares and coronal mass ejections occur, leading to geomagnetic storms on Earth. The new images show these sunspots in great detail, allowing us to distinguish their individual structural elements.

The solar telescope also made images of structures on the Sun, such as convection cells. These are located on the surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, and make it look like the surface of corn. Each such cell, consisting of hot plasma, can be up to 1,600 km across.

Above the photosphere is the chromosphere, or atmosphere of the Sun, in which you can detect thin strands of plasma. These plasma structures look like brushstrokes and textures on a painting.

The Inouye Solar Telescope's unique ability to collect data in unprecedented detail will help scientists better understand the Sun's magnetic field and the processes that take place thereon.