HAWAII, 25th April, 2025 (WAM) -- The world’s largest solar telescope has been equipped with a powerful new instrument, offering scientists an unprecedented view into the inner workings of the sun.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, perched atop a mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, is already known for capturing highly detailed images of the sun’s surface. The observatory is designed to study the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields in search of clues to some of the sun’s biggest mysteries.
The instrument, known as the Visible Tunable Filtergraph, or VTF, is the fifth and most powerful instrument to be added to the Inouye Solar Telescope. It is designed to study the regions of the sun where eruptions ignite — the visible surface, or photosphere, and the invisible layer above, known as chromosphere — with the highest level of precision of any solar observatory.
The newly-installed VTF recently looked at the sun for the first time and, even in its ongoing technical test phase, is already delivering on its promise to resolve and image very fine details on the sun, scientists say.
The instrument recently captured its first images of the sun during its technical testing phase, resolving extremely fine structures within a sunspot. Each pixel in the original image corresponds to just 10 kilometres on the solar surface.
The image reveals a sunspot spanning 625 million square kilometres, with each pixel capturing an area of just 6.2 miles (10 km), according to a statement from scientists.
Sophisticated computer processing during forthcoming science operations from VTF will sharpen the images even more and resolve even smaller structures on the sun, scientists say.
What sets the VTF apart is its ability to dissect sunlight with extraordinary accuracy. It hosts two devices called interferometers that dissect sunlight into its fundamental components. Functioning as a sophisticated colour and polarisation filter, they select narrow slices of the sun's light spectrum to create hundreds of sharp images per second.
The collected data helps scientists unravel the complex interplay between the hot plasma and magnetic fields that drive solar eruptions.