Latest news with #USNationalScienceFoundation
NDTV
04-05-2025
- Science
- NDTV
World's Largest Solar Telescope Captures Stunning Details Of Sun's Surface
The world's biggest solar telescope has captured the stunning details of the Sun's surface, showing sunspots and intense magnetic activity. The newly released image comes as the Sun moves towards its most active phase of its 11-year solar cycle. The image was released by Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. It is the first image captured with the US National Science Foundation's new Visible Tunable Filter (VTF). The high-resolution photograph, taken in early December, shows a collection of enormous sunspots only 10 kilometres apart in size but spanning thousands of miles. The image showed sunspots, each about the size of a continent on Earth. Scientists from the International Solar Cycle Prediction Panel, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in October that the sun reached the solar maximum or peak of activity. The sun's magnetic poles reverse during the peak, causing more sunspots to show up on its surface. These sunspots are cooler, active areas on the Sun that can cause big solar explosions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). When these solar outbursts take place, they shoot out charged particles into space, and if these particles reach Earth, they can disrupt satellites, cause power outages or affect GPS and phone signals. Friedrich Woeger, the instrument program scientist at the NSF Inouye Solar Telescope, said, "A solar storm in the 1800s (the Carrington Event) reportedly was so energetic that it caused fires in telegraph stations. We need to understand the physical drivers of these phenomena and how they can affect our technology and ultimately our lives." Mark Miesch, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that sunspots were like magnetic plugs blocking some of the heat coming up to the surface. That's the reason they look darker and are cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface, he added. He compared these sunspots to an oven. "Even though these sunspots are cooler, they are still hotter than any oven on Earth," he added.
Scientific American
02-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
National Science Foundation Halts Funding Indefinitely
Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to 'stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,' according to an email seen by Nature. The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world's biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last 'until further notice'. Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for 'topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities'. Proposals judged not 'in alignment' must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. An NSF staff member says that although good science can still be funded, the policy has the potential to be 'Orwellian overreach'. Another staff member says, 'They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades'. One program officer says they are resigning because of the policy. Nature spoke with five NSF staffers for this story, all on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media. An NSF spokesperson declined Nature 's request for comment. Continuing turmoil The changes are hitting an agency already in crisis. In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated roughly 1,040 grants that would have awarded US$739 million to researchers and their institutions. The agency's director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last month. Uncertainty is also being felt by scientists outside the agency. Colin Carlson, an expert in disease emergence at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, leads an initiative to predict viruses that pose pandemic threats. The project, which involves roughly 50 researchers across multiple universities, is funded by a $US12.5 million NSF grant. The project's latest round of funding was approved, but Carlson worries about subsequent rounds, and the fate of other researchers. Unless it is lifted, the freeze 'is going to destroy people's labs,' Carlson says. Funding for the NSF, as for all other federal agencies, is set by the US Congress. To date, the agency has received only about one-quarter of the funding that Congress appropriated to it for the current fiscal year, which ends on 30 September. More cuts on the way It is not clear whether a funding shortfall is driving the latest grant freeze. But Matthew Lawrence, a specialist in administrative law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says that under a 1974 law called the Impoundment Control Act, the NSF must give Congress special notice of the grant halt, which would otherwise be unlawful. Cuts to NSF spending this year could be a prelude to a dramatically reduced budget next year. Science previously reported that US President Donald Trump will request a $4 billion budget for the agency in fiscal year 2026, a 55% reduction from what Congress appropriated for 2025. Similarly, the proposed 2026 budget for the National Institutes of Health calls for a 44% cut to the agency's $47 billion budget in 2025, according to documents leaked to the media. During Trump's first term, Republicans in Congress rejected many of the president's requested cuts to science funding, but it is not clear that they will do so again. In the long term, severe reductions to science funding could damage the economy, according to new research. A report by economists at American University in Washington DC estimates that a 50% reduction in federal science funding would reduce the US gross domestic product by approximately 7.6%. 'This country's status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point,' one NSF staffer says. NSF staff expect hundreds more grants to be terminated Friday.
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.
