The world's largest solar telescope, Daniel K. Inouye of the US National Science Foundation, located in Hawaii, has captured his first image of a sunspot. In doing so, it achieved a spatial resolution roughly 2.5 times higher than ever before, and the construction of the telescope is not yet complete.
The most detailed image of a sunspot shows us its dark center, which burns at more than 4,000 ° C despite being cooler than the surrounding area.
This telescope that was built specifically to discover the explosive behavior of the Sun is already powerful enough to capture close-up images of our fiery star.
"Now we can point to the Sun with the most advanced solar telescope in the world to capture and share incredibly detailed images and add to our scientific knowledge about the activity of the Sun", explain the experts in the journal Solar Physics that collects the work.
Reference: Rimmele, TR, Warner, M., Keil, SL et al. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope – Observatory Overview. Sol Phys 295, 172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-020-01736-7
