The largest observatory of the Sun, the new American solar telescope Daniel K.Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) located in Hawaii, he took his first portrait of a woman sunspot, big enough to fit the Earth.
The spots are dark, cooler regions on the surface of our parent star, which are created by the dynamics of its magnetic field. The majority of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the Sun's most explosive phenomena, originate from regions with intense magnetic field around the spots and can have a profound effect on space weather and the Earth itself.
Solar activity, as measured by the number of spots observed, follows a periodic 11-year cycle. When solar activity reaches its peak, the Sun is filled with dark spots. Astronomers expect the Sun, which reached its nadir of activity in December 2019, when sunspots had almost disappeared, to reach the new peak of its current cycle in mid-2025.
The Inouye telescope began construction in 2013 and is expected to be completed in 2021. Its capabilities are shown by the fact that the first image of a spot it took has a spatial resolution of about two and a half times larger than any sunspot photo so far, showing magnetic structures up to 20 kilometres in diameter on the surface of the Sun.
The photo reveals a tiny piece of the Sun's surface, about 16,000 kilometres long (Earth is 12,742 km in diameter) and with a temperature of almost 4,200 degrees Celsius.
