First High Resoluted Image Ever of Sun Captured

A new scientific leap has been registered by humanity. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), the world's largest solar telescope, captured its first image of the sun — the highest-resolution image of our star to date — last month.

The image came after a nearly 50-year study of the Earth's most important star, where it reveals small magnetic structures in incredible detail.

The 4-meter telescope located on the peak of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui, will see more instruments coming online, increasing its ability to shed light on the active sun. The remaining instruments will be turned on as construction continues on the 13-story building, with full operations planned to begin in July 2020.

According to scientists, the new telescope, Inouye, will also delve into one of the most counterintuitive solar mysteries: why the sun's corona, or outer layer, is hotter than its visible surface.

Inouye director Thomas Rimmele said during a news conference: "Up to now, we've just seen the tip of the iceberg."

The scientists said the telescope captured the newly released image, which is its first engineering image, on Dec. 10, 2019, but the observatory is not yet complete. Only a single instrument, the Visible Broadband Imager (VBI), was operational at that time. The VBI takes extremely high-resolution images of the solar surface and lower atmosphere.

The sun constantly sheds material into space in all directions. This ongoing solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, causing the auroras.

The latest malfunctioning happened in September 2017, when  a trio of hurricanes advanced across the Caribbean, solar flares caused multiple radio blackouts on the sunlit side of Earth. Multiple radio blackouts halted communications during the dangerous time, sometimes for as long as 8 hours.

"A naturally occurring event on Earth and a naturally event on the sun, when combined, represent a much bigger threat to our society," National Science Foundation Director Valentin Pillet said during the news conference.