The GREGOR telescope in Spain captured the images, and the high-quality pictures returned a spectacular glimpse at the sun’s magnetic field.
The highest-resolution images of the sun show an impressing close look at the surface of our sun.
GREGOR is a solar telescope from the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, Spain. It is handled by German scientists of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics.
They returned a detailed picture of the complicated structure of solar plasma, including sunspots. In these regions, the sun’s magnetic field is extremely strong and provokes a spike in pressure that decreased the temperature and darkens the surrounding atmosphere.
About The Telescope
The GREGOR telescope started its operation in 2012, and it experienced a significant redesign this year that was halted for a while because of the ongoing worldwide pandemic.
The system offers a detailed view of regions as small as 50 kilometers (31 miles), extremely small compared to the sun’s diameter of 1.4 million kilometers (approximately 870,000 miles).
A press released announcing the photos reads:
“This is as if one saw a needle on a soccer field perfectly sharp from a distance of one kilometer.”
Lucia Kleint, a leader of the GREGOR revamping process, stated:
“This was a very exciting but also extremely challenging project.”
“In only one year, we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics, and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality,” she added.
Similar images of the star’s surface taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii were published in January, becoming very popular on social media platforms from commentators who stated that the star’s hot plasma looks a lot like popcorn kernels.
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