December 14 According to US media reports, the world’s largest solar observatory recently released the clearest picture of sunspots in history. Under the warm colors of red and orange, people can see details of sunspot activities.
In Hawaii, the world’s largest solar telescope, the Inoue Solar Telescope (DKIST), is still under construction, but its first sunspot photo taken on January 28, 2020 is already the clearest sunspot image ever seen.
Thomas Rimmerle, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory of the United States, said: “This image of sunspots has a spatial resolution of 2.5 times higher than before, showing a magnetic field structure as small as 20 kilometers on the surface of the sun.”
The researchers said that the diameter of the image is about 16,000 kilometers. When they image the area, they can track changes in fine structure in a short time (about 100 seconds).
It is reported that the formation of sunspots is caused by the emergence of magnetic fields in the sun to the surface of the photosphere. Because of the suppression of plasma convection by the strong magnetic field of sunspots, their active area is lower than the ambient temperature, so it looks darker.
