Jakarta –
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), the world’s largest solar telescope, captured the Sun’s subtle features in great detail, including glimpses of decaying Sunspots.
Perched on a mountaintop on the Hawaiian island of Maui, DKIST has been observing the Sun for the past year, collecting high-resolution data on the activity, or lack thereof, in the Sun’s atmospheric layers.
Using this data, scientists hope to answer some of the biggest questions about the Sun, such as why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than the visible surface of the Sun and how its magnetic field suddenly changes shape and ejects powerful plasma jets from the Sun.
Quoted from SpaceRefDKIST released detailed images of the Sun in May 2023. One of the most interesting is an Earth-sized sunspot on the surface of the Sun which is actually the lowest layer of the atmosphere called the photosphere.
Detailed image of the Sun. Photo: DKIST
Sunspots are dark and relatively cold areas where strong magnetic fields exist, making them the site of flares and disruptive coronal mass ejections (CME).
“These spots have a dark central region known as the umbra with the strongest magnetic field. The center of this sunspot is surrounded by an elongated filament region called the penumbra, which in the latest image released by DKIST appears as a light-headed strand,” the DKIST research team said.
Sunspots don’t exist forever. They last for about a week and wax and wane as the Sun progresses through its 11-year activity cycle.
The DKIST image shows a sunspot that will eventually break apart, visible from the bridge of light that stretches across the sunspot’s umbra.
To capture these images, DKIST used an advanced camera called the Visible-Broadband Imager, which was the first instrument to come online when the telescope began operating and is capable of taking high-resolution images of the photosphere and chromosphere.
Watch the video “The First Portrait Captured by China’s Solar Exploration Satellite”
(rns/rns)
2023-09-08 11:15:07
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