See amazing new sun photos from the world's largest solar telescope

A mosaic showing sunspots and other features on the surface of the sun.
This mosaic of new solar images produced by the Inouye Solar Telescope was released on May 19, 2023. The mosaic previews solar data taken during the telescope’s first year of operations during its commissioning phase. Images include sunspots and quiet-sun features. (Image credit: NSF/AURA/NSO)

The world's largest solar telescope has captured fine features on the sun in remarkable detail, including rare glimpses of decaying sunspots.

Perched atop a mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) has been eyeing the sun for the past year, collecting high-resolution data about the activity, or lack thereof, in the sun's three-layered atmosphere. Using this data, scientists hope to answer some of the biggest questions about the sun, like why its outer atmosphere, or corona, is much hotter than its visible surface and how its magnetic fields abruptly reshape and blast out powerful jets of plasma from the solar atmosphere.

A newly released DKIST mosaic features granular views of Earth-size sunspots on the "sun's surface," which is really its lowest atmospheric layer called the photosphere. Sunspots are dark, relatively cool patches where strong magnetic fields reside, betraying the homes of future flares and disruptive coronal mass ejections

Related: How to observe the sun safely (and what to look for) 

This image by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope reveals the fine structures of a sunspot in the photosphere. Within the dark, central area of the sunspot’s umbra, small-scale bright dots, known as umbral dots, are seen. The elongated structures surrounding the umbra are visible as bright-headed strands known as penumbral filaments.  (Image credit: NSF/AURA/NSO Image Processing: Friedrich Wöger(NSO), Catherine Fischer (NSO) Science Credit: Rolf Schlichenmaier at Leibniz-Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS))

Such spots have dark central regions known as umbra where magnetic fields are the strongest. These sunspot centers are surrounded by elongated filamentary regions called penumbra, which are seen in the new images as "bright-headed strands," DKIST team members wrote in an image description published on Friday (May 19).

To capture these images, DKIST used a powerful camera called the Visible-Broadband Imager, which was the first instrument to come online when the telescope became operational and is capable of clicking high-resolution images of the photosphere and the chromosphere. The telescope captured countless "dark, fine threads" in the chromosphere, which are a result of abundant magnetic field activity from below, scientists say.

In this image by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the fine structure of the quiet sun is observed at its surface or photosphere. Heating plasma rises in the bright, convective "bubbles" (granules), then cools and falls into the dark, intergranular lanes.  (Image credit: NSF/AURA/NSO Image Processing: Friedrich Wöger(NSO), Catherine Fischer (NSO))

Sunspots do not exist forever; they last for roughly a week and grow in number and shrink as the sun progresses through its 11-year activity cycle. The latest DKIST images show a sunspot that "will eventually break apart," revealed by a light bridge stretching across a sunspot's umbra.

Numerous umbral fragments are seen near another sunspot, whose presence reveals "a sunspot that's lost its penumbra," DKIST team members wrote in the image description. "It is extraordinarily rare to capture the process of a penumbra forming or decaying."

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Sharmila Kuthunur
Space.com contributor

Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur.

  • Helio
    Incredible quality!
    Reply
  • billslugg
    Amazing detail!

    I never knew penumbral striations had hot cores and cool envelopes.

    The picture showing granules also shows tiny, intense convection cells sometimes appearing in the cool, descending area bordering the granules. Tiny clouds of hot gas erupting from the cool valley between cells. Where is this energy coming from? Must be some sort of phase transition. But it is all plasma. No solid or liquid pases. Go figure.
    Reply
  • murgatroyd
    Where does the mass expelled from the Sun in a coronal mass ejection (CME) go? It must cool down and turn to dust. Does it clump? What happens if a space probe runs into it?
    Reply
  • Helio
    murgatroyd said:
    Where does the mass expelled from the Sun in a coronal mass ejection (CME) go? It must cool down and turn to dust. Does it clump? What happens if a space probe runs into it?
    Some of it will fall back onto the Sun. This is charged plasma and it is the bursting of the magnetic fields that cause the eruptions, so this magnetic field will pull some of the material back, along with gravity.

    But the ejection speeds are so high that billions of tons can far exceed the Sun's escape velocity. These ejections continue onward and eventually reach the heliopause, which is a boundary region where our solar system is plowing through the thin interstellar medium.

    Any object that travels through this mass of high speed plasma will suffer. The Apollo astronauts were lucky to have avoided some narrow misses with flares and CME's in those days. The ISS has a special area with much greater protection for the occupants when these blasts hit them.
    Reply
  • castor
    billslugg said:
    Amazing detail!

    I never knew penumbral striations had hot cores and cool envelopes.

    The picture showing granules also shows tiny, intense convection cells sometimes appearing in the cool, descending area bordering the granules. Tiny clouds of hot gas erupting from the cool valley between cells. Where is this energy coming from? Must be some sort of phase transition. But it is all plasma. No solid or liquid pases. Go figure.
    I agree! Amazing Details! Lucky you..... I never knew how to read penumbral striations🧐
    I look at this pictures and see a skinscar, a human lens. As far as I am informed I myself have plasma in my vanes. Time for namechange?
    Reply
  • billslugg
    One must be careful not to visualize the images as being 3 dimensional. The eye sees a deep well with a black bottom and many striations pouring down into it. This is not the case as this image is of things essentially in one plane.
    We know that darker is cooler. We know that the dark area is a magnetic field coming straight at the camera. Also, charged particles do not cross magnetic field lines but must flow with them. Also, when charged particles flow in parallel they constrict or pinch into narrow flow lines. Try to keep all this in mind when interpreting the images. Truly amazing.
    Reply
  • castor
    Thank you. WE I could follow. The 'We' is an amazing new information.
    I love to see those pictures. I never imagined they could be shared one day so easily!
    Reply
  • billslugg
    Thank you for the kind words. The science of charged plasma is very complex. Read what you can. Take it in small steps.
    Reply