The GREGOR telescope, located at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, is the largest solar telescope in Europe and now it has just gifted us with unprecedented details of the Sun’s surface, as small as 50 kilometers.
Given the size of the Sun and its distance from us, to give us an idea, what we are seeing is like observing a needle on a soccer field in high resolution from an altitude of 1 kilometer.
“This was a very exciting project, but also extremely challenging. In just one year, we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality, ”commented Lucia Kleint, who directs the German solar telescopes in Tenerife.
Taking into account that updating an instrument as complex as a telescope of this caliber requires a lot of time, the mandatory quarantine time served to improve GREGOR by replacing two optical elements designed and polished with an accuracy of 6 nanometers, approximately, less than one tenth the width of a human hair.
“The project was quite risky because such telescope upgrades often take years, but great teamwork and meticulous planning have led to this success. We now have a powerful instrument to solve puzzles about the Sun, ” explained Svetlana Berdyugina, director of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS).
These are the highest resolution images ever taken of the Sun by a European telescope, revealing spectacular details of the evolution of sunspots and structures in the solar plasma. All of this will allow solar scientists to study a wide range of possibilities such as magnetic fields, convection, turbulence, solar flares and sunspots in astonishing detail.
Moving images
Reference: Lucia Kleint et al, GREGOR: Optics redesign and updates from 2018–2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2020). DOI: 10.1051 / 0004-6361 / 202038208
