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Sun's surface seen in new detail
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoMay I recommend this weeks BBC "In Our Time" podcast on Solar Wind (I cannot link to it because my podcast app just throws up some html card thingy destroying 30 years of sanity / rant / moan) As usual a deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic set of guests and they were talking about this telescope and several other probes launched and due to be launched well worth it
- alamortsubite 7y agohttps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dg9n https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dg9n
- foota 7y agoMan, it says each of those cells is 30k km, imagine how quickly the plasma most be moving in there for the effects you see to happen.
- tjoff 7y agoCertain that is the case, but is it necessarily in real time?
- FPGAhacker 7y agoIt says each cell is the size of France. The resolution of the scope is 30km.
- bravoetch 7y agoYeah but how many Libraries of Congress is France across?
- markdown 7y agoI want to know how many american football fields long it is, and how many olympic-sized swimming pools all that plasma would fill up.
- foota 7y agoLots and... Lots.
- the_dege 7y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+of+france+%2F++area+of+american+football+fields https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+of+france+%2F++ar...
- bregma 7y agoAlso, how many Hiroshimas of energy is emitted, and what is the CO2 equivalent in terms of global warming?
- hnuser123456 7y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+sun+%2F+volume+of+olympic+swimming+pool https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+sun+%2F+volu...
- bregma 7y agoThe article I read said each cell was the size of Texas. Which is it?
- alamortsubite 7y agoThe same video is uncropped on nso.edu and shows a timestamp. Looks like it's sped up about 100x.
- jlarocco 7y agoIt's crazy how big it is. https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/full_image_with_scale_med_res.jpg https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/full_image_wi... That image covers an area 2.5x the size of Earth, but it's showing less than 0.1% of the Sun.
- puzzledobserver 7y agoDoes that mean that the material within those structures is moving at supersonic speeds? The video makes it look almost serene. I wonder what the speed of sound is in the solar medium, at the ambient temperature and pressure.
- drjesusphd 7y agoAbout 7000 m/s on the surface.
- newnewpdro 7y ago> Each night, a swimming pool’s worth of ice is emptied into eight tanks. During the day, coolant is routed through the ice tanks and distributed through the observatory by 7.5 miles (12km) of piping. More than 100 air jets are also positioned behind the main mirror. Are they actually making a swimming pool's worth of ice cubes that are "emptied" into these tanks? I looked at the wikipedia page [0] for more information but there's no mention of the cooling system. It sounds like a major part of the interesting engineering challenge, strange to not find photos or even a description of the cooling system's design. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...
- orbital-decay 7y agoYes - they actually make ice from the collected rainwater. Here's the paper with an overview of their cooling system: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924592 https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924592 Notably, the telescope enclosure is actively cooled to mitigate thermal seeing effects.
- buildbot 7y agoThat was an interesting read, thanks!
- bregma 7y agoThe real question is, is the ice available for the scientist's cocktails? Can we express the total volume if ice in terms of Martini cocktail shakers?
- amatecha 7y agoYou can view all the photos and videos directly on the National Solar Observatory's website: https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/ https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/ (and press release at https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/ https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-fir... ) Would way prefer people link the original sources in cases like this, where the news articles add almost nothing useful and instead bombard me with advertisements and user-tracking, etc.
- leeoniya 7y agoutterly unusable on mobile. at least bbc has that part worked out.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoThe BBC only shows a very zoomed out video though, so you don't actually see the new bit, making it an article about new resolution illustrated at pretty low resolution -_-
- DoctorOetker 7y agoI'm not seeing a video, could you give the URL of the actual media file instead?
- ian0 7y agohttps://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/DKIST-First-Light-MZ-crop1-loop_4K-H264.mp4 https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/DKIST-First-L... 4K – H.264 (45 MB) There are some others here: https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-cropped-field-movie/ https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-cropped-fie... Non cropped ones here: https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-full-field-movie/ https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/first-light-full-field-...
- koheripbal 7y ago
- mncharity 7y agoFor anyone curious, some years ago I talked with the NSO outreach folks, and they were aware then that the Sun is white, and that yellow/orange is a misconception widespread and problematic in both astronomy education and the general US population, and that their colorizations were not helping with that. Their justification was roughly that you need to hook people with what they expect, and only then can you make progress with educating them. I thought and think that that's very much the wrong call, as well as over the line ethically, but... oh well. Though the misconception really is pervasively widespread, even among first-tier astronomy graduate students, so perhaps there might now be a degree of confusion present as well. And a (very) few instances of colorization are representationally valid, if unfortunate in their collateral damage, as when representing that some instrument's sampling band is in yellow.
- mturmon 7y agoYou have mentioned a neat point that illustrates some of the complexity of an "image" like the ones shown. After 20 or so minutes poking around, I'm not 100% sure what instrument took the images in the OP. There are five focal planes that can get the light from this much-anticipated solar telescope, which has been envisioned and prototyped going back at least 20 years. Anyway, I think the instrument for the images was VBI, the Visible Broadband Imager (https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/instruments/vbi/ https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/instruments/vbi/). It takes images in 8 spectral bands, in the visible range. But these bands are very narrow, like 0.5nm or less. (Solar astronomy is cool that way, lots of photons of whatever energy you want.) The specific bands have been carefully selected. One band that page calls call "continuum" (sometimes referred to as "pseudo-white-light", found in the "spectral resolution" submenu) is at 450nm, in the blue. All the 8 various bands illustrate activity at different altitudes in the solar atmosphere. The 450nm band will be from the solar photosphere, where sunspots and other familiar features live. Some others are much higher up, and sunspots will not be present as such in those bands. If this conjecture is true, the displayed images are taken in a very narrow slice of spectrum around 450nm (or another one around 668nm, which is in red) and then mapped through a black/orange/yellow/white color map for display. This kind of "colorization" is pervasive throughout solar astronomy, and used universally by astronomers themselves for their own science images. (Visit https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/newsite/images.html https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/newsite/images.html and weep.) As hinted in your last sentence, it's not at all clear what a "correct" colormap for light from 450nm +/- 0.5nm should be. Shades of blue? For more on your point: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.htm... (old-fashioned site, but technically 100% solid).
- dchasson 7y agoThis news is stunningly correlated to my lecture this morning from Dr Bailey at Virginia Tech. The man was in Alaska finishing the launch of his sounding rocket for NASA. The ideal gas law dictates these amazing structures of the solar atmosphere. But.... incredible cosmic magnetic powers influence these structures in the solar atmosphere... That we still can't explain. Later I hope to discover alien life in the distributions of charged particles and their induced magnet fields... I may need to aquire another degree in the mean time. #fields #studyhard
- mirimir 7y agoIn Surface Detail, Iain Banks mentioned life forms based on stellar magnetic fields. It also has an amusing ship mind, which presents as a young male sociopath: "Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints".
- keyle 7y agoIt's weird I wrote some sun materials in the past, for a game, and I ended up roughly with that. What I based myself on was a sci-fi movie (can't remember), and they had it right. Can't really figure out why it looks that way though, anyone care to explain why it rises and drops like that? Is there anything like currents, or it's a straight up and down? Does the sun rotate at all or it's 'static' from our perspective? (I imagine it's rotating with the stars within our galaxy)
- oliverhopcrof 7y agoI know next to nothing about the sun but I think the article implies that it’s because of convection currents—closer to the center, plasma heats up and expands, rises, cools off, and falls back in. The picture looks vaguely like a Voronoi diagram too, which sort of fits as the plasma has to spread out of its own hot plume before sinking.
- phodo 7y agoI had a similar comment about voronoi. Nature and science are beautiful.
- chongli 7y agoClose. The Sun is not a fully convective star. Convection only occurs in the outer 30% or so. The inner part is called the radiation zone [1] and it is here that energy from fusion in the core makes its way out by radiative transfer as well as conduction. This is a very slow process compared to convection, taking more than 170,000 years for the photos produced by fusion to reach the convection zone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_zone
- oliverhopcrof 7y agoWouldn’t we be observing the outer 30% (or 1%) though? From the diagram on the page you linked it seems that the granules in the photo exist in the photosphere, where convection is the dominant mode of energy transfer. That said, none of the conduction could happen without radiation further inside.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 7y ago> The observations could help resolve longstanding mysteries of the sun, including the counterintuitive feature that the corona – the sun’s atmosphere – is heated to millions of degrees when its surface is only 6,000C. Is that really a "mystery"? I mean, you can easily create plasma in a microwave oven, and the magnetron doesn't get very hot.
- praptak 7y agoThe magnetron does not produce the energy though. That's what makes the sun case counterintuitive.
- mirimir 7y agoI guess. But consider that the total thermal energy of the Sun is negligible compared to the total energy flux. And that thermal conduction is way too slow, anyway.
- mirimir 7y agoReally, do the math. Take the sun's mass, and multiply by average absolute temperature and the specific heat of hydrogen. That'll be a huge number, but far less than the sun's energy output. You could also compare energy output with what's possible through thermal conduction, based on the sun's radius, its density at various depths, and the heat transfer coefficient of hydrogen.
- olivermarks 7y agohttps://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light/ https://www.nso.edu/press-release/inouye-solar-telescope-fir...
- HenryKissinger 7y agoThis is great. But I really hope to see close pictures of the Sun during my lifetime. And by close, I mean ultra high resolution pictures and footage taken from one million kilometers or closer. I want to see the grainy detail of these cell like structures.
- jcims 7y agoCan't wait to see sunspots this close. What if they all have an angry face in them?
- KindOne 7y agoDiscussion 9 hours ago, The Guardian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185565
- dang 7y agoWe've merged that discussion hither.
- rwmj 7y agoGoing to be a good decade for Sun observations because the Parker Solar Probe will make closer and closer passes around the Sun for the next 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe
- gadders 7y agoAnd the ESA Solar Orbiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Orbiter
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DoctorOetker 7y agoDoes anyone know where I can find DC-blocked audiorate measurements of solar intensty / noise? Or alternatively forward me to an observatory that measures this?
- hnuser123456 7y agoIt would be a source of background noise in the LIGO readings which were converted to audio, but I'm not sure how loud the sun is relative to other cosmic (and terrestrial) phenomena, and of course those clips are also going to feature a loud chirp from merging neutron stars and black holes. https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2 https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2
- ArtWomb 7y agoThe granule flow in that animation would make a great RNG ;) Congrats to all involved, and kudos for ushering in a new golden age of solar observations At first glance of the static image, it appeared to me the granular structure of solar surface convection resembled a thousand other phenomena in Nature: poly-crystalline grain boundaries in metal alloys, lipid cells in fatty tissue, colloidal suspensions of cloud smoke But watching the animation made me realize how unique and dissimilar this is to any other chaotic turbulent flow Due to the sun's gargantuan scale, even throwing the world's fastest supercomputers at the problem, we cannot adequately simulate all the convection, plasma, rotation and magnetic interactions of solar surface and interior dynamics These images make me feel very humbled, reminding us of our place in the cosmos! Weak influence of near-surface layer on solar deep convection zone revealed by comprehensive simulation from base to surface https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau2307 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau2307
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joshspankit 7y agoThe next wave of closely-guarded RNG secrets could very well be which solar coordinates your camera is pointed at!
- minimalc 7y agoI work as a graduate SW engineer at Andor, which produced the SCMOS camera they used to capture the images (https://andor.oxinst.com/balor-scmos https://andor.oxinst.com/balor-scmos). Quite a nice surprise to see during my morning commute! Everyone here is extremely pleased to see how the images turned out. Very impressive work from DKIST
- joshspankit 7y agoIf you don’t mind the curiosity: These images seem to have a sort of “enhanced blurring” and depth-flattening reminiscent of early 3d ultrasounds. Am I interpreting that right? Or is the surface of the sun really like that?
- minimalc 7y agoYou'd have to ask a solar physicist about those solar structures I'm afraid or an optical expert about the image properties, I just work with camera software. If you haven't already you can download their press release which goes into a bit more detail than the main article [1]. I've also found some interesting bonus footage of the camera in a test setup for those that are curious (the actuating gray box in the background) [2] [1] https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MediaKit.zip https://www.nso.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MediaKit.zip (1.25GB) [2] https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/image17/ https://www.nso.edu/telescopes/dkist/image17/
- OnACoffeeBreak 7y agoSomething I just realized while reading this article is that the Earth is only about 100 solar diameters from the Sun. This was completely out of proportion with my gut feel. Edit: change "radii" to "diameters"
- ljcn 7y agoAbout 200 actually (you mistook the diameter for the radius). https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+au+%2F+radius+of+the+sun https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+au+%2F+radius+of+the...
- OnACoffeeBreak 7y agoYes, you are correct. I meant diameters.
- DonaldFisk 7y agoI presume you mean diameters, not radii. Solar radius = 700000km Mean distance of Earth from sun = 1AU = 1.5e8 km = 214.3 solar radii. From Earth, solar radius = 0.25 degrees. 233 solar radii in 1 radian.
- OnACoffeeBreak 7y agoYep, I meant to write diameters. > From Earth, solar radius = 0.25 degrees. 233 solar radii in 1 radian. I don't understand this. I think I understand that the sun would take up 0.5 degrees of the "view" (I don't have a good word for this) when looked at from Earth, so radius is 0.25 degrees. But how does the second statement follow? I get that a radian is about 57.3 degrees, so 57.3 / 0.25 = 230, but why why does 1 radian make sense to use here?
- iclelland 7y agoAn arc that spans one radian of a circle's circumference has the same length as the radius. So if you imagine a connected line of 233 suns across the sky, spanning 57.3 degrees, the actual length of that line would be the same as the distance from your eyes to the sun.