Tag Archives: Sharpestever

Astronomers have zoomed in on small loops of plasma within a powerful solar flare for the first time, potentially revealing the fundamental building blocks of the sun‘s violent storms.  The images, captured with the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, reveal arcs of hot gas just 10 to 30 miles wide that follow the sun’s magnetic fields. Earlier …

The sun never sits still, yet until recently our best snapshots blurred its fine threads. Now an image set from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakalā resolves details just 20 kilometers wide, letting researchers watch bright and dark stripes move across the solar surface. “We investigate the fine-scale structure of the solar surface for the first time with …