Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii, the most powerful solar telescope on the planet, has provided scientists with incredibly detailed images of the Sun’s surface. For the first time, they have shown ultra-thin magnetic bands that ripple across the star like light curtains and significantly affect the light we see. The study is published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Image credit: NSF/NSO/AURA
Located atop Maui’s volcano, the 4-meter DKIST telescope has allowed a team from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to see structures on the Sun’s photosphere with unprecedented clarity. The images clearly show how the surface is covered with furrows. They are about 20 km wide – comparable to the length from the center of Kyiv to Vyshhorod, but tiny for the giant Sun.
These mysterious streaks are located along the walls of solar granules – these are convection cells where hot plasma rises from the depths of the star to the surface. But the main discovery is that the furrows are a visual representation of dynamic magnetic fields that resemble oscillating curtains. When sunlight passes through these magnetic curtains, it begins to flicker, alternating between bright and dark areas.
“These bands are reflections of tiny changes in the magnetic field. A dark band means a weaker field, and a bright band means a relatively stronger field”, explains lead author David Kuridze of the National Solar Observatory (NSO).
For this breakthrough, the scientists used a special instrument of the Inouye telescope – the Visible Broadband Imager (VBI), which operates in a narrow range of visible light (G-band), which is ideal for detecting magnetic activity. Comparison of the images with supercomputer models of solar surface physics showed an excellent match.
The Sun, located at a distance of 149 million kilometers from Earth, remains a mysterious star. Studying its magnetic “architecture” at such a microscopic level is the key to unraveling the occurrence of powerful solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and their impact on the Earth – the so-called space weather. These are the phenomena that cause magnetic storms.
This study is extremely relevant now that the Sun has entered the maximum phase of its 11-year cycle. This period is characterized by significantly increased activity.
Understanding the subtle mechanics of solar magnetism, as new observations from DKIST show, is critical to improving space weather forecasts and protecting our technologically dependent civilization.
Earlier, we reported how the old telescope’s “vision” reveals a star in unprecedented detail.
Provided by phys.org
