Remarkable Images of the Sun Revealed with the New Solar Telescope

The sun has some fascinating features, spawning solar flares and coronal mass ejections that hurl billions of particles into space. Now, researchers have obtained new and remarkably detailed photos of our nearest star with help from the New Solar Telescope (NST). These images reveal never-before-seen details of solar magnetism with phosphoric and chromospheric features.

Understanding the sun and its behavior is crucial for the future. Solar particles hurled from our nearest star can disrupt both communications and satellites, which means that predicting this type of space weather is important for preventing blackouts. This new instrument can help reveal details that could help with this type of goal. 

One of the images shows a lawn-shaped pattern, revealing ultrafine magnetic loops rooted in the photosphere below. The other, in contrast, shows one of the most precise images of a sunspot ever taken.

A text book version of a sunspot looks a bit like a daisy with many petals; the dark core is the umbra while the petals are the penumbra. Yet with the unprecedented resolution of the new instrument, the researchers could see many previously unknown small-scale sunspot features, such as twisting flows along the penumbra's less dark filaments and the complicated dynamic motion in the light bridge vertically spanning the umbra's darkest part.

"With our new generation visible imaging spectrometer (VIS), the solar atmosphere from the photosphere to the chromosphere can be monitored in near real time," said Wenda Cao, NJIT Associate Professor of Physics, in a news release.

Currently, the telescope is being upgraded to include the only solar multi-conjugate adaptive optics system. The goal is to fully correct atmospheric distortion over a wide field of view and the ability to probe the sun in near infrared. In the meantime, it's producing some fantastic images of our closest star that the public, as well as scientists, can appreciate.