Latest news with #DanielK.InouyeSolarTelescope
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
World's largest solar telescope gains powerful new 'eye' to study the sun's secrets
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The world's largest solar telescope has gained a powerful new "eye" that promises deeper views into the workings of our sun than ever before, scientists announced on Thursday (April 24). The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which eyes the sun from its perch atop a mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, has been sending home stunningly detailed views of the surface of our star. The observatory, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is designed to scrutinize the solar atmosphere and the sun's magnetic field for tiny features that might reveal answers to some of the fundamental solar mysteries. The telescope's already-sharp vision has now been boosted significantly thanks to a new instrument designed to maximize the information gleaned from the sun's light, scientists said on Thursday. "The instrument is, so to speak, the heart of the solar telescope, which is now finally beating at its final destination," Matthias Schubert, who is the project scientist for the instrument at the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, said in a statement. The instrument, known as the Visible Tunable Filtergraph, or VTF, is the fifth and most powerful instrument to be added to the Inouye Solar Telescope. It is designed to study the regions of the sun where eruptions ignite — the visible surface, or photosphere, and the invisible layer above, known as chromosphere — with the highest level of precision of any solar observatory. The newly-installed VTF recently looked at the sun for the first time and, even in its ongoing technical test phase, is already delivering on its promise to resolve and image very fine details on the sun, scientists say. The image above features a sunspot on the sun's surface spanning a whopping 241 million square miles (625 million square kilometers), yet each pixel covers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) on the sun's surface, according to the statement. Sophisticated computer processing during forthcoming science operations from VTF will sharpen the images even more and resolve even smaller structures on the sun, scientists say. Researchers at the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany have been developing VTF for the past 15 years, nearly the same duration as the Inouye Solar Telescope's own development. What makes the instrument so special is its ability to analyze sunlight in exceptional detail. VTF hosts two devices called interferometers that dissect sunlight into its fundamental components. Functioning as a sophisticated color and polarization filter, they select narrow slices of the sun's light spectrum to create hundreds of sharp images per second. The collected data helps scientists unravel the complex interplay between the hot plasma and magnetic fields that drive solar eruptions, according to the statement. RELATED STORIES: — See amazing new sun photos from the world's largest solar telescope — The largest solar telescope on Earth snaps the most detailed image of a sunspot we've ever seen — The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope: Getting a close-up look at our sun "VTF enables images of unprecedented quality and thus heralds a new era in ground-based solar observation," Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, which is a partner in the project, said in the statement. The Inouye Solar Telescope is designed to operate for 44 years, which should cover four of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycles. And in that time, its suite of instruments will likely change. "The real power in the Inouye Solar Telescope is its flexibility, its upgradability," David Boboltz, the associate director for the Daniel Inouye Solar Telescope, previously said. "It's like having a Swiss Army Knife to study the sun."
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
First image from the world's largest solar telescope captures the sun in unheard-of detail
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A newly released image of the sun captured by the world's largest solar telescope shows the surface of our nearest star in unprecedented detail, shedding light on its fiery complexity. The image is the first taken by the US National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope's new Visible Tunable Filter, or VTF. The instrument can build a closer-than-ever, three-dimensional view of what's happening on the sun's surface, according to a news release. The close-up reveals a cluster of continent-size dark sunspots near the center of the sun's inner atmosphere, at a scale of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel. These blemishes mark areas of intense magnetic activity, where solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are likely to occur. Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that erupt from the sun's outer atmosphere. Detailed images such as this one, which was taken in early December, pose an important way for scientists to learn about and predict potentially dangerous solar weather, said Friedrich Woeger, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope instrument program scientist, in an email. 'A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations,' Woeger said. 'We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives.' These energetic outbursts from the sun can interact with our planet's own electromagnetic field, causing disturbances to key infrastructure such as electrical power grids and satellite-powered communication networks, he explained. The sun goes through periods of high and low magnetic activity in an 11-year cycle. In October, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced the sun reached the peak of activity, called the solar maximum. During the peak, the sun's magnetic poles flip, and more sunspots appear on its surface. The maximum is expected to last for several months, so it's a fitting time for the Inouye Solar Telescope to be ramping up its instrument testing with spectacular images of the sun's dynamic surface. Like boiling soup on a stove, heat escapes the core of the sun and rises to its surface through fluid motions, said Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Miesch was not involved in the research. Sunspots, then, are like 'magnetic plugs,' or tangles in the star's complex magnetic fields that prevent the heat from reaching the surface, Miesch said. For this reason, the sunspots, which emit less light than other areas of the sun, appear darker in images and are cooler than their surroundings. Nevertheless, sunspots are 'still hotter than any oven on Earth,' he added. The apparent texture of the sun comes from the varying densities and temperatures within its surface, which has layers similar to an onion. By 'tuning' in to different wavelengths, or colors, like a radio tuner, the VTF offers a way to probe these various layers and observe what is happening between them, Miesch said. In other words, while an image from a personal camera uses light that contains multiple wavelengths at the same time, the VTF, a type of imaging spectro-polarimeter, filters measurable wavelengths one by one. To accomplish this filtering, the instrument uses an etalon — two glass plates separated by mere microns. 'The principle is not unlike that of noise-canceling headphones: when two waves with similar wavelength(s) travel on the same or an intersecting path, they can interact with each other to either cancel each other out, or they can reinforce each other,' Woeger said. 'Light waves 'trapped' between those two plates interfere, and the distance between the plates selects which exact 'colors' of the light are passed on, and which ones cancel out.' In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images through the different filters and combines them into a three-dimensional snapshot. Researchers can then use the resulting views to study the temperature, pressure, velocity and magnetic field structure at different layers of the solar atmosphere. 'Seeing those first spectral scans was a surreal moment. This is something no other instrument in the telescope can achieve in the same way,' said Dr. Stacey Sueoka, a senior optical engineer at the National Solar Observatory, in a statement. The imaging spectro-polarimeter represents a culmination of over a decade's worth of development. Located at the NSF's National Solar Observatory, at the top of Maui's 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) Haleakalā volcanic mountain, the VTF itself spans multiple stories of the Inouye Solar Telescope. After the VTF was designed and built by the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, the instrument's parts were shipped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and then reassembled — like a 'ship in a bottle,' Woeger said. The team expects the tool to be fully operational and ready for use by 2026. 'The significance of the technological achievement is such that one could easily argue the VTF is the Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place,' said Dr. Matthias Schubert, a VTF project scientist at the Institute for Solar Physics, in a statement. The solar telescope is among several other recent efforts by scientists to better understand the sun and its stormy weather patterns, including the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA launched in 2020, and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
World's largest solar telescope takes first ultra-detailed image of the sun
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A newly released image of the sun captured by the world's largest solar telescope shows the surface of our nearest star in unprecedented detail, shedding light on its fiery complexity. The image is the first taken by the US National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope's new Visible Tunable Filter, or VTF. The instrument can build a closer-than-ever, three-dimensional view of what's happening on the sun's surface, according to a news release. The close-up reveals a cluster of continent-size dark sunspots near the center of the sun's inner atmosphere, at a scale of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel. These blemishes mark areas of intense magnetic activity, where solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are likely to occur. Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that erupt from the sun's outer atmosphere. Detailed images such as this one, which was taken in early December, pose an important way for scientists to learn about and predict potentially dangerous solar weather, said Friedrich Woeger, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope instrument program scientist, in an email. 'A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations,' Woeger said. 'We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives.' These energetic outbursts from the sun can interact with our planet's own electromagnetic field, causing disturbances to key infrastructure such as electrical power grids and satellite-powered communication networks, he explained. The sun goes through periods of high and low magnetic activity in an 11-year cycle. In October, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced the sun reached the peak of activity, called the solar maximum. During the peak, the sun's magnetic poles flip, and more sunspots appear on its surface. The maximum is expected to last for several months, so it's a fitting time for the Inouye Solar Telescope to be ramping up its instrument testing with spectacular images of the sun's dynamic surface. Like boiling soup on a stove, heat escapes the core of the sun and rises to its surface through fluid motions, said Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Miesch was not involved in the research. Sunspots, then, are like 'magnetic plugs,' or tangles in the star's complex magnetic fields that prevent the heat from reaching the surface, Miesch said. For this reason, the sunspots, which emit less light than other areas of the sun, appear darker in images and are cooler than their surroundings. Nevertheless, sunspots are 'still hotter than any oven on Earth,' he added. The apparent texture of the sun comes from the varying densities and temperatures within its surface, which has layers similar to an onion. By 'tuning' in to different wavelengths, or colors, like a radio tuner, the VTF offers a way to probe these various layers and observe what is happening between them, Miesch said. In other words, while an image from a personal camera uses light that contains multiple wavelengths at the same time, the VTF, a type of imaging spectro-polarimeter, filters measurable wavelengths one by one. To accomplish this filtering, the instrument uses an etalon — two glass plates separated by mere microns. 'The principle is not unlike that of noise-canceling headphones: when two waves with similar wavelength(s) travel on the same or an intersecting path, they can interact with each other to either cancel each other out, or they can reinforce each other,' Woeger said. 'Light waves 'trapped' between those two plates interfere, and the distance between the plates selects which exact 'colors' of the light are passed on, and which ones cancel out.' In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images through the different filters and combines them into a three-dimensional snapshot. Researchers can then use the resulting views to study the temperature, pressure, velocity and magnetic field structure at different layers of the solar atmosphere. 'Seeing those first spectral scans was a surreal moment. This is something no other instrument in the telescope can achieve in the same way,' said Dr. Stacey Sueoka, a senior optical engineer at the National Solar Observatory, in a statement. The imaging spectro-polarimeter represents a culmination of over a decade's worth of development. Located at the NSF's National Solar Observatory, at the top of Maui's 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) Haleakalā volcanic mountain, the VTF itself spans multiple stories of the Inouye Solar Telescope. After the VTF was designed and built by the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, the instrument's parts were shipped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and then reassembled — like a 'ship in a bottle,' Woeger said. The team expects the tool to be fully operational and ready for use by 2026. 'The significance of the technological achievement is such that one could easily argue the VTF is the Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place,' said Dr. Matthias Schubert, a VTF project scientist at the Institute for Solar Physics, in a statement. The solar telescope is among several other recent efforts by scientists to better understand the sun and its stormy weather patterns, including the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA launched in 2020, and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
World's largest solar telescope takes first ultra-detailed image of the sun
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A newly released image of the sun captured by the world's largest solar telescope shows the surface of our nearest star in unprecedented detail, shedding light on its fiery complexity. The image is the first taken by the US National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope's new Visible Tunable Filter, or VTF. The instrument can build a closer-than-ever, three-dimensional view of what's happening on the sun's surface, according to a news release. The close-up reveals a cluster of continent-size dark sunspots near the center of the sun's inner atmosphere, at a scale of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel. These blemishes mark areas of intense magnetic activity, where solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are likely to occur. Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that erupt from the sun's outer atmosphere. Detailed images such as this one, which was taken in early December, pose an important way for scientists to learn about and predict potentially dangerous solar weather, said Friedrich Woeger, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope instrument program scientist, in an email. 'A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations,' Woeger said. 'We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives.' These energetic outbursts from the sun can interact with our planet's own electromagnetic field, causing disturbances to key infrastructure such as electrical power grids and satellite-powered communication networks, he explained. The sun goes through periods of high and low magnetic activity in an 11-year cycle. In October, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced the sun reached the peak of activity, called the solar maximum. During the peak, the sun's magnetic poles flip, and more sunspots appear on its surface. The maximum is expected to last for several months, so it's a fitting time for the Inouye Solar Telescope to be ramping up its instrument testing with spectacular images of the sun's dynamic surface. Like boiling soup on a stove, heat escapes the core of the sun and rises to its surface through fluid motions, said Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Miesch was not involved in the research. Sunspots, then, are like 'magnetic plugs,' or tangles in the star's complex magnetic fields that prevent the heat from reaching the surface, Miesch said. For this reason, the sunspots, which emit less light than other areas of the sun, appear darker in images and are cooler than their surroundings. Nevertheless, sunspots are 'still hotter than any oven on Earth,' he added. The apparent texture of the sun comes from the varying densities and temperatures within its surface, which has layers similar to an onion. By 'tuning' in to different wavelengths, or colors, like a radio tuner, the VTF offers a way to probe these various layers and observe what is happening between them, Miesch said. In other words, while an image from a personal camera uses light that contains multiple wavelengths at the same time, the VTF, a type of imaging spectro-polarimeter, filters measurable wavelengths one by one. To accomplish this filtering, the instrument uses an etalon — two glass plates separated by mere microns. 'The principle is not unlike that of noise-canceling headphones: when two waves with similar wavelength(s) travel on the same or an intersecting path, they can interact with each other to either cancel each other out, or they can reinforce each other,' Woeger said. 'Light waves 'trapped' between those two plates interfere, and the distance between the plates selects which exact 'colors' of the light are passed on, and which ones cancel out.' In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images through the different filters and combines them into a three-dimensional snapshot. Researchers can then use the resulting views to study the temperature, pressure, velocity and magnetic field structure at different layers of the solar atmosphere. 'Seeing those first spectral scans was a surreal moment. This is something no other instrument in the telescope can achieve in the same way,' said Dr. Stacey Sueoka, a senior optical engineer at the National Solar Observatory, in a statement. The imaging spectro-polarimeter represents a culmination of over a decade's worth of development. Located at the NSF's National Solar Observatory, at the top of Maui's 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) Haleakalā volcanic mountain, the VTF itself spans multiple stories of the Inouye Solar Telescope. After the VTF was designed and built by the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, the instrument's parts were shipped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and then reassembled — like a 'ship in a bottle,' Woeger said. The team expects the tool to be fully operational and ready for use by 2026. 'The significance of the technological achievement is such that one could easily argue the VTF is the Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place,' said Dr. Matthias Schubert, a VTF project scientist at the Institute for Solar Physics, in a statement. The solar telescope is among several other recent efforts by scientists to better understand the sun and its stormy weather patterns, including the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA launched in 2020, and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun.
CNN
29-04-2025
- Science
- CNN
World's largest solar telescope takes first ultra-detailed image of the sun
A newly released image of the sun captured by the world's largest solar telescope shows the surface of our nearest star in unprecedented detail, shedding light on its fiery complexity. The image is the first taken by the US National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope's new Visible Tunable Filter, or VTF. The instrument can build a closer-than-ever, three-dimensional view of what's happening on the sun's surface, according to a news release. The close-up reveals a cluster of continent-size dark sunspots near the center of the sun's inner atmosphere, at a scale of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) per pixel. These blemishes mark areas of intense magnetic activity, where solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are likely to occur. Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that erupt from the sun's outer atmosphere. Detailed images such as this one, which was taken in early December, pose an important way for scientists to learn about and predict potentially dangerous solar weather, said Friedrich Woeger, the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope instrument program scientist, in an email. 'A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations,' Woeger said. 'We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives.' These energetic outbursts from the sun can interact with our planet's own electromagnetic field, causing disturbances to key infrastructure such as electrical power grids and satellite-powered communication networks, he explained. The sun goes through periods of high and low magnetic activity in an 11-year cycle. In October, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced the sun reached the peak of activity, called the solar maximum. During the peak, the sun's magnetic poles flip, and more sunspots appear on its surface. The maximum is expected to last for several months, so it's a fitting time for the Inouye Solar Telescope to be ramping up its instrument testing with spectacular images of the sun's dynamic surface. Like boiling soup on a stove, heat escapes the core of the sun and rises to its surface through fluid motions, said Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Miesch was not involved in the research. Sunspots, then, are like 'magnetic plugs,' or tangles in the star's complex magnetic fields that prevent the heat from reaching the surface, Miesch said. For this reason, the sunspots, which emit less light than other areas of the sun, appear darker in images and are cooler than their surroundings. Nevertheless, sunspots are 'still hotter than any oven on Earth,' he added. The apparent texture of the sun comes from the varying densities and temperatures within its surface, which has layers similar to an onion. By 'tuning' in to different wavelengths, or colors, like a radio tuner, the VTF offers a way to probe these various layers and observe what is happening between them, Miesch said. In other words, while an image from a personal camera uses light that contains multiple wavelengths at the same time, the VTF, a type of imaging spectro-polarimeter, filters measurable wavelengths one by one. To accomplish this filtering, the instrument uses an etalon — two glass plates separated by mere microns. 'The principle is not unlike that of noise-canceling headphones: when two waves with similar wavelength(s) travel on the same or an intersecting path, they can interact with each other to either cancel each other out, or they can reinforce each other,' Woeger said. 'Light waves 'trapped' between those two plates interfere, and the distance between the plates selects which exact 'colors' of the light are passed on, and which ones cancel out.' In just a few seconds, the powerful instrument captures hundreds of images through the different filters and combines them into a three-dimensional snapshot. Researchers can then use the resulting views to study the temperature, pressure, velocity and magnetic field structure at different layers of the solar atmosphere. 'Seeing those first spectral scans was a surreal moment. This is something no other instrument in the telescope can achieve in the same way,' said Dr. Stacey Sueoka, a senior optical engineer at the National Solar Observatory, in a statement. The imaging spectro-polarimeter represents a culmination of over a decade's worth of development. Located at the NSF's National Solar Observatory, at the top of Maui's 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) Haleakalā volcanic mountain, the VTF itself spans multiple stories of the Inouye Solar Telescope. After the VTF was designed and built by the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, the instrument's parts were shipped across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and then reassembled — like a 'ship in a bottle,' Woeger said. The team expects the tool to be fully operational and ready for use by 2026. 'The significance of the technological achievement is such that one could easily argue the VTF is the Inouye Solar Telescope's heart, and it is finally beating at its forever place,' said Dr. Matthias Schubert, a VTF project scientist at the Institute for Solar Physics, in a statement. The solar telescope is among several other recent efforts by scientists to better understand the sun and its stormy weather patterns, including the Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and NASA launched in 2020, and NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the first spacecraft to 'touch' the sun.
