5 ms·
New adaptive optics shows details of our star's atmosphere
- tomrod 1y agoThis was beautiful!
- ChuckMcM 1y agoAgreed, and for folks who can still remember some of Jackson's electrodynamics a really interesting visualization of field equations in "real" time.
- doctorwho42 1y agoLol, glad I'm not the only one thinking that way
- tsujamin 1y agoYou say beautiful, I say existentially terrifying, let’s split the difference
- itishappy 1y agoI feel like the moment you learn the relative scales, it's over, there's no going back. There's a billion WWII ending atom bombs going off every day up there. How are we still ok?
- lazide 1y agoHey, at least we can’t hear the screaming (/s). Distance/dilution really is the solution eh? Besides, without all those fusion bombs going off our air would be liquid/solid, which is extremely inconvenient.
- wffurr 1y agoMy preferred design for fusion reactors uses gravitational confinement and are placed 150 million miles away.
- jajko 1y agoWith enough distance, even largest hypernovae are just tiny sparkles on the background of the sky.
- doctorwho42 1y agoDon't forget a vacuum or else you will cook and deafen yourself and everyone else
- layer8 1y agoWe would be much worse off without it.
- tomrod 1y agoDistance squared law of gravity.
- amelius 1y agoSoon coming to a fusion reactor near you.
- srean 1y agoThere was this sci-fi story set on the sun. Humans interact with sentient plasma, some as old as the universe. Forgetting the name.
- stevenwoo 1y agoSundiver is most prominent in my recollection.
- GolfPopper 1y agoI think that's why H.P. Lovecraft's work still resonates - he first captured that cosmic sense of horror that came with humanity starting to understand our place in the universe, and how tiny and insignificant it really is. I caught some of that sense not too long ago, looking at the Moon with a new-to-me (amateur) telescope and wide-field eyepiece. Some combination of the seeing conditions and optics let my mind really connect with what I was seeing, in a way it never had before in decades of amateur astronomy. I understood that what I was looking at - grokked it, if you will allow - across an abyss that was incomprehensibly vast to me, but still only the tiniest of distances of the scale of the solar system, let alone the universe, was a whole other world, a vast globe of rock and dust, moving through the void, its mountains and valleys utterly empty of the air, water life that has always surrounded me. My description doesn't really do it justice. It was the first time I'd ever really gotten a sense for the scales involved in my hobby, where what I was looking at felt real and not just an image through an eyepice and it made me catch my breath. Amazing, disturbing, and a little frightening all at once.
- jvanderbot 1y agoOnce, I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a university telescope. You know the kind with a motorized dome and car sized actuators and such. It was so, so visible and yet so, so far. Somehow using all that power to see it in real time and still have it be small but look so insanely huge somehow. I had this vertigo and the scale of the solar system kind of rushed at me. Just like you say.
- itishappy 1y agoUtterly alien. For reference, the field of view here is about 2.5x the diameter of the Earth. Astronomical scales remain mind bending to me.
- jvanderbot 1y agoIt's not even comprehendable for our brains. The scale, temperature, and velocities of these fluffy pixels is just enormous. It's high energy physics, CFD, all in real life and real time.
- _Adam 1y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02564-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02564-0 The paper has more details. What's interesting to me is that the key innovation isn't the deformable mirror but rather the design of a wavefront sensor that focuses on coronal features (instead of the "grain" on the solar surface prior systems used).
- so-rose 1y agoWhat a time to be alive. I can look at my magic enchanted light-box and observe "rain" on the surface of the sun. It's almost nice that mysteries remain - apparently, the physical mechanism behind solar spicules [1] remains "hotly" (!!) debated. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_spicule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_spicule
- srean 1y agoWith NSO (not NSO.edu but the cyberweapons/malware company) there is a hidden tenuous pun. Adaptive optics started in a secret space weaponry research funded by SDI. When a few profs independently proposed the idea in their NSF research grant proposal they were told - we already know this stuff. https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-scope-the-sky-with-quick-change-mirrors https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-...
- casenmgreen 1y agoBlocks evil Tor users.
- ambicapter 1y agoThey talk about creating an artificial star by stimulating light at 90km in the atmosphere, would it be useful to have a satellite that you can reposition that would shine a calibrated light source back at earth? I imagine you could also do some tricks with the light source to maybe get more accurate data about the atmospheric distortions.
- pyinstallwoes 1y agoLike the moon ?
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoThe satellite beam wouldn’t go through the parts of the atmosphere the telescope is pointing. You need to calibrate exactly for the spot the telescope is observing.
- ambicapter 1y agoThis would be a satellite with repositioning capability (I'm aware this would probably use up consumable fuel).
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoAnother problem is that the satellite moves across the sky.
- jeremyscanvic 1y agoThis is so exciting! My colleagues are doing research in astronomical imaging except on the more theoretical side of things - it's really neat to come across cool downstream applications like that!
- a-a--a--df- 1y ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 1y agoIf you like this, call your congressman.
- kadushka 1y ago“Clearest images to date” - wouldn’t images taken from space, much closer to the sun, be clearer?
- lmm 1y agoDepends, space telescopes tend to be smaller for obvious reasons. You might want to compare to the Parker Solar Probe's images like https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Show-Article.php?articleID=115 https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Show-Article... .
- krunck 1y agoWhat fascinates me is the stable structure in the first video. Everything is so ephemeral yet that structure remains largely in place and in the same shape yet it's internals are seething.