Solar storms have already caused destruction in the past – and the world was not prepared for these storms. But a new discovery can prepare us better for next solar explosions
A newly dismissed image of the sun, captured by the world’s largest solar telescope, shows the surface of our nearest star with an unprecedented detail, shedding light on its igneous complexity.
The image is the first obtained by the new visible tuning filter, or VTF, from the solar telescope Daniel K. Inouye of the US National Foundation of the Sciences. The instrument can build a three -dimensional view closer to what is happening on the surface of the sun, according to a press release.
The close-up reveals a set of dark sunscreens the size of a continent near the center of the inner atmosphere of the sun, at a scale of 10 kilometers per pixel.
These spots mark areas of intense magnetic activity, where solar eruptions and coronal mass ejections are likely to occur. Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma, and magnetic fields that break out of the outer atmosphere of the sun.
Detailed images like this, taken in early December, constitute an important way for scientists to know and predict potentially dangerous solar weather conditions, says Friedrich Woeger, scientist of NSF’s solar Inouye instrument program, via email.
“A solar storm in the nineteenth century (the Carrington event) was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations,” explains Woeger. “We need to understand the physical factors that determine these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives.”
These sun’s energy explosions can interact with the electromagnetic field of our planet, causing disturbances in fundamental infrastructure, such as electricity networks and satellite communication networks, he explained.
The sun goes through periods of high and low magnetic activity in a 11 -year cycle. In October, scientists from the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration, NASA and the international solar cycle forecast panel announced that the sun reached the peak of activity, the so -called solar maximum. During the peak, the magnetic poles of the sun reversed and more solar spots appear on its surface.
The maximum solar is expected to last several months, so it is a height suitable for the solar telescope Inouye to accelerate the tests of its instruments with spectacular images of the dynamic surface of the sun.
A closer look at the sun
Like the boiling soup in a stove, the heat escapes the sun’s core and rises to its surface through fluid movements, explains Mark Miesch, a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Miesch was not involved in the investigation.
Solar spots are therefore as “magnetic buffering” or tangled in the complex magnetic fields of the star that prevent heat from reaching the surface, Miesch says. For this reason, solar spots, which emit less light than other areas of the sun, appear darter in the images and are colder than those around them. However, solar spots are “even warmer than any oven on earth.”
The apparent texture of the sun results from the different densities and temperatures of its surface, which has layers similar to an onion. By “tuning” different wavelengths, or colors, such as a radio tuner, the VTF offers a way to probe these various layers and observe what is happening between them, says Miesch.
In other words, while an image of a personal chamber uses light that contains several wavelengths at the same time, the VTF, a type of image spectrum, filters measurable wave lengths one by one.
To make this filtering, the instrument uses one etalon – two glass plates separated by mere microns.
“The principle is not very different from that of noise cancellation: when two similar wave waves travel in the same way or on an intersection path, they can interact with each other, nullifying or reinforcing each other,” says Woeger. “The” trapped “light waves between these two plates interfere and the distance between the plates selects which exact colors of light are transmitted and which ones cancel.”
In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images through different filters and combines them in a three-dimensional photograph.
Researchers can then use the resulting images to study temperature, pressure, speed and magnetic field structure in different layers of the solar atmosphere.
“Seeing the first spectral analyzes was a surrealist moment. This is something that no other instrument of the telescope can achieve the same way,” says Stacey Sueoka, senior optical engineer of the National Solar Observatory, in a statement.
Near the summit of the Haleakalā volcanic mountain in Maui, NSF’s solar telescope is prepared to pave the way to a deeper understanding of our mother star Photo NSF/NSO/AURA
What follows?
The image spectro member represents the culmination of more than a decade of development.
Located at the NSF National Solar Observatory, at the top of the 3,000-meter haleakalā volcanic mountain in Maui (Hawaii), the VTF extends over several floors of the solar Inouye telescope.
After the VTF was conceived and built by the Institute of Solar Physics in Germany, the instrument pieces were transported through the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and then set up again – like a “ship in a bottle,” says Woeger.
The team expects the tool to be fully operational and ready to be used by 2026.
“The meaning of technological feat is such that it can be easily argued that the VTF is the heart of the solar Inouye telescope and is finally hitting its usual place,” says Matthias Schubert, a scientist at the VTF project at the Institute of Solar Physics, in a statement.
The solar telescope is among several recent scientists’ efforts to better understand the sun and its stormy climatic standards, including Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European space agency and NASA launched in 2020, and NASA’s Solar Probe, the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun.
