click image to enlarge!!
Thanks to my editor CK for this article about these astounding images from the new Japanese telescope called Hinode:
The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun’s chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode.
The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday.
“Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date,” says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. “We’ve seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success.”
Another surprise sighting is that of giant magnetic field loops crashing down onto the Sun’s surface as if they were collapsing from exhaustion, a finding that Golub describes as “impossible”. Previously, scientists thought they should emerge from the Sun and continue blowing out into space.
“Almost every day, we look at the data and we say – what the heck was that?” says Golub, a member of the XRT science team.
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