Reader Mark called my attention to these new videos from the Daniel K. Inouye solar telescope, a four-meter scope near the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai‘i (you can read about it at the National Science Foundation’s site here). It’s taken some stunning pictures of the Sun’s surface, including giant roiling cells of plasma shown in the “video” below, which appears to be time-lapse photography, but is no less impressive because of that. The NSF site notes this:
The first images from NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope show a close-up view of the Sun’s surface, which can provide important detail for scientists. The images show a pattern of turbulent “boiling” plasma that covers the entire Sun. The cell-like structures — each about the size of Texas — are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the Sun to its surface. That hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of “cells,” cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. (See video available with this news release.)
And the video, by SciNews, adds this:
The first movie covers an area of 36,500 x 36,500 km (22,600 x 22,600 miles, 51 x 51 arcseconds), while the second one covers an area of 19,000 x 10,700 km (11,800 x 6,700 miles or 27 x 15 arcseconds).
The diameter of the Earth is about 18,000 km, so the first “video” covers a square area that’s about two Earth diameters on each side. The Sun, in contrast, has a diameter of about 1,400,000 km—about 38 times larger than one side of this video.
That is simply amazing.
Also: For some reason I’m now craving caramel corn.
Oooooo – solar plasma
If anyone needs to worship something, no need to look beyond the hydrogen atom!
Stunning. Although I could do without the music.
The diameter of the earth is 12,742 km.
Yes, this was amazing. Similar but much slower circulation patterns occur in the earth’s mantle, which then drives the slow recycling of the crust. Also our atmosphere does this only much more quickly.
Nothing short of astounding, glad I got the opportunity to see our energy supply close up, it does look a little like honeycomb.
I think I did a neutrino shudder looking at it. 😜
The movies are indeed constructed from time-lapse digital still images – the fastest shown [45 seconds in] is around 180 times normal speed.
The construction of each digital still is complicated – a burst of images are recorded at 30 fps through a tight colour filter & analysed to form single sharpened image [speckle-reconstruction]. This is done to minimise the effect of ‘astronomical seeing’ – “the amount of apparent blurring and twinkling of astronomical objects like stars due to turbulent mixing in the atmosphere of Earth, causing variations of the optical refractive index” [Wiki]
The DKIST has a resolution at the Sun of 20 km [12 mi] – all made possible by this speckle imaging technique DESCRIBED HERE
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Whoa, but Mama, that’s where the fun is.
It was YEARS before I realised that that song was by “Loose Windscreen”, having only ever heard the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWVL4B-4pI
It’s track one, side one on The Boss’s first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., the one with the front flap that looked like a postcard.
Those were the days of vinyl, Jez. Mighta been before your time.
It’s where Bruce staked his claim as a Dylanesque lyricist. The Manfred Mann cover is a pale, bowdlerized, top-40 imitation.
Agree! Never understood why the radio stations always played the Mann version. Bruce’s was sooooo much better. Awesome album showing a fantastic new talent..
Solar porridge on a rapid boil!
Exactly! The same physics.
We really ARE in the Goldilocks zone!
Yes, but the phenomenon you see in your boiling porridge and on the surface of the sun is convection. The outer layer of the sun is called the convection zone. The same physical laws describe convection in boiling water and the convection of hot gasses on the surface of the sun. The parameters are different.
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees
(And magnified it looks like boiling cheese.)
Yo ho it’s hot, the sun is not a place where we could live
But here on earth there’d be no life without the light it gives…
I know the tune could be tweaked better by this new look at the sun’s surface, but I lack the energy; I haven’t seen the sun for a few days.
Not bad at all Mark!
Anyone know why some of the crevices between cells are bright, whereas most are dark?
The crevices between the cells are ‘dark’ [relatively speaking] where there isn’t plasma rising above the surface. Where the crevices appear to be light is because very hot plasma is spewing upwards above the crevices – riding the electro-magnetic loops.
I assume the plasma that’s in free ‘flight’ & riding emanates from between the cells. A guess.
Short answer: inter-cell slopover.
You know that these images are in ultraviolet, right?
I see you describe yourself as a science-informed philosopher Varun, so riddle me this: why would we flush money down the toilet putting a UV telescope inside Earth’s atmosphere? Even up a mountain, that’s not a smart move. Visible light is wavelength 380 nm [the blue end] to 740 nm [the red end] & UV telescopes are space-based or on very high altitude balloons these days.
The released time-lapse videos from DKIST that I’ve seen are filtered at:
[1] the visible light wavelength 705.839 nm dark-red.
[2] the near-IR 789.186 nm
In fact, of the eight filters available on the VBI [Visible Broadband Imager] only one is ‘invisible’ & that’s not at the UV [Blue end] but at the Red end 789.186 nm IR.
My bad…
I was just annoyed that the releases of the beautiful images of the Sun, used for educational purposes, weren’t accompanied by a caveat that it wouldn’t look to a person that way when viewed with naked eyes.
The releases were very thorough, it was the media interpretation/presentation that was crap – many important details were filtered out. New Scientist was very, very bad on this story & the popular press [in the UK] were only marginally better.
By-the-by: A very deep red colour palette would have been more accurate for the images, but I think the NSO chose yellow/orange to meet general expectations of what colour Sol appears to be from northern latitudes [up in Europe & N. America] Earth most of the time. The important message was the cellular plasma motion & the scales involved – a safe, expected yellow raises the least questions.
Of course, trying to get this view with naked eyes would fry your retina or the like anyway, so …
This happened to Galileo, who looked at the Sun with his telescope.
Urban legend. Galileo going blind because of sun-gazing with a telescope isn’t likely. He wrote about the projection method devised by a pupil & adopted it as superior to viewing through clouds or smoked glass or at sunset/sunrise – this was decades before he went completely blind in his late 60s. The symptoms of eye problems he described are not those associated with viewing the sun nor with over-use of a telescope. MORE INFO HERE
Indeed. This was something I read 40 years ago. Interesting that Galileo was aware of the dangers looking at the sun directly.
Info from DKIST WIKI & the NSO SITE [National Solar Observatory]
VBI blue channel [45″ field of view]
393.327 nm dark-violet
430.520 nm violet
450.287 nm blue continuum
486.139 nm turquoise
VBI red channel [69″ field of view]
656.282 nm light-red
668.423 nm red continuum
705.839 nm dark-red
789.186 nm near Infra Red
Thanks Jerry & all the rest, very illuminating [sic!]!