For our North American team, it is winter. Here in Illinois it’s been drizzling about a ½ cm of snow a day for week after week after week – or for at least 10 days that feel like 10 weeks. When your in the coldest, grossest time of year, it is easy to get excited about a little bit of sun, and it is with both awe and amusement that we share with you the newest images from the newest solar telescope.
This week we received no less than 3 press releases announcing that the Inouye Telescope on Haleakala has begun to capture images of the Sun. This 4 meter telescope allows solar scientists to see fine details on the sun in never-before-seen resolution. In new images, which you can see at DailySpace.org, we can see cell-like structures that are the size of Texas or France, and these images, with 3 times higher resolution than any prior instrument, can resolve features as small as Manhattan Island. This has allowed the imaging of features just 20 miles or 30 kilometers across.
This new telescope looks at the sun in a way that is fundamentally different from what we do with our spaced-based observatories, which are smaller and have larger fields of view that focus on the Sun’s roiling outer layers, and often view the sun in different wavelengths – or colors – of light that can’t be seen from Earth. With this multi-meter scope, scientists are focusing in on the details of the Sun’s magnetic field effects at the surface, where convective cells roil like the surface of churning oil.
These images don’t yet bring new science, and in all likelihood we’ll be waiting until next winter before we start seeing breakthroughs from its remarkable images. For now, however, as our skies hang grey, the teams at the Institute for Astrophysics, which administers this facility, and at the National Science Foundation, which fund this facility, decided we needed to share in their sun-filled preliminary data.
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