(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers from the US National Solar Observatory have released the first images from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST).
It is located in Hawaii and is the most powerful in the world at the moment, according to Space.com.
The telescope took the first-ever detailed image of the Sun’s chromosphere, the atmospheric layer just below the surface. It covers an area with a width of 81,000 square kilometers.
The chromosphere is extremely difficult to see due to the bright light of the Sun. Her previous shots were taken during solar eclipses, showing the chromosphere as a bright red ring around the star’s body.
The DKIST telescope managed to bypass this obstacle. Thanks to a mirror measuring four meters, it collects more sunlight than all other telescopes.
As a result, he was able to take the clearest pictures of the star with the highest resolution – 18 kilometers per pixel.
The images show fragments of boiling plasma, similar to a mosaic. The size of the smallest of them reaches 30 kilometers.
The lighter areas correspond to the hottest areas, the dark ones indicate the cooled plasma, which gradually sinks lower towards the center of the star.
The work on the creation of the NSF Inouye telescope took about 25 years. It was inaugurated on August 31, 2022 in the presence of members of the scientific community and the indigenous peoples of Hawaii.
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