The 6,000-degree ball of popcorn at the heart of our solar system
THESE caramel- coloured nuggets certainly look good enough to eat – but you might want to let them cool down first.
For this is the 6,000C surface of the sun, captured in never-before-seen detail by a powerful new telescope.
High resolution images make visible for the first time ever features as small as 15 miles long, no small feat given the sun is 870,000 miles wide and 92million miles from Earth.
And, as well as giving us a rare glimpse at the blinding ball of fire – each of its golden specks of plasma the size of France – the photos could also help scientists predict any freak space weather which can disrupt satellites and power stations.
The images, which show the sun seven times clearer than previous efforts, come from the Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope which sits at 10,000ft on the summit of a Hawaiian volcano and has a 13ft mirror large enough to reflect the sun’s structure.
Since holding a magnifying glass under the sun is enough to start a fire, the massive mirror requires up to a swimming pool of ice each night to keep it cool.
And it took a team of more than 50 people, working 800 hours a week for six months, to polish the surface of the mirror, as a small blemish on its surface would have affected the quality of data. Professor Jeff Kuhn, from the University of Hawaii at
Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy, said: ‘ It is literally the greatest leap in humanity’s ability to study the sun from the ground since Galileo’s time.’
David Boboltz, of the National Science Foundation in the US, said that the telescope will collect more data in five years ‘than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612’.
And Mihalis Mathioudakis, of Queen’s University, Belfast, said: ‘The imaging produced opens new horizons in solar physics.’