First images from Haleakala solar telescope show the fire | News, Sports, Jobs

The first image produced by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope shows the sun’s surface in a level of detail never before achieved by other telescopes. The image shows a pattern of turbulent “boiling” gas that covers the entire sun, evidence of heat traveling from the inside of the sun to its surface. NSO / AURA / NSF photo

From the ice-cold summit of Haleakala, the world’s largest solar telescope took the most detailed image of the sun to date — revealing a fiery surface that looks a little something like caramel corn and has a lot to do with weather and technology on Earth.

The first-ever images produced by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope were released Wednesday by the National Science Foundation, offering a level of detail never before achieved by other telescopes.

“DKIST represents one of the biggest jumps in our ability to see and understand the sun since Galileo,” said Jeff Kuhn, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy and one of the four co-principal investigators for the telescope project.

Located at the 10,000-foot summit of Haleakala, the $340 million Inouye Solar Telescope relies on a 13-foot mirror and an elaborate cooling system to hone in on the sun’s roiling surface.

Essentially a giant nuclear reactor, the sun burns about 5 million tons of hydrogen fuel every second and produces energy that radiates into space in every direction, according to the NSF. The tiny fraction of that energy that hits Earth at 93 million miles away makes life on the planet possible. And while astronomers have made great gains in their knowledge of the sun, many mysteries of Earth’s nearest star still elude the scientific community.

The dome of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (left) towers over the domes of Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan STARRS) I and 2 at the summit of Haleakala in 2018. The $340 million Inouye Solar Telescope relies on a 13-foot mirror and an elaborate cooling system. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

One of those great mysteries is magnetism, a source of energy on the sun that can sometimes be released explosively in what is known as corona mass ejections, or solar flares, Kuhn said. Once released, that magnetic energy sends out particles and X-rays that travel through space, potentially disrupting GPS, power grids or satellites used for communication.

Sometimes that means the difference between life or death. When Hurricane Irma barreled through the Caribbean as a Category 5 storm in 2017, an eruption of solar activity during the same time triggered radio blackouts and caused aviation officials to lose track of aircraft, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Having an instrument like the Inouye Solar Telescope will help scientists keep an eye on the sun and figure out when it might create a massive burst of energy. It also will allow them to understand how magnetism changes the brightness of the sun and how that in turn impacts the Earth’s temperatures and climate change.

“DKIST is a completely new window for being able to measure solar magnetism,” Kuhn said. “The two things it does really, really well is to look out into space to trace the magnetic fields, which we’ve never been able to do, but also to look at the surface of the sun and see the details that collectively tell us that a sunspot is about to do something bad.”

The images taken by the telescope in December show a surface that resembles caramel corn or a wrinkled sheet of gold foil, in actuality a pattern of “turbulent, ‘boiling’ gas that covers the entire sun,” the NSF said. The cell-like structures are each about the size of Texas and indicate that heat is traveling from the inside of the sun to the surface. Hot solar material known as plasma “rises in the bright centers of these ‘cells,’ cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection.”

The National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope can capture a region of the sun nearly 24,000 miles wide. Close up, these images show large, cell-like structures roughly the size of Texas. NSO/AURA/NSF photo

Kuhn said that in the dark regions on the boundaries of the “bubbles” are tiny birthing points where astronomers believe the magnetic field of the sun is being created.

The images showcase the telescope’s microscope-like powers to see fine details on the surface of the sun. However, the part of the telescope that will allow it to look into the sun’s atmosphere is not yet functional, Kuhn said. Of the telescope’s five “first light” instruments, two were built by the Institute for Astronomy and will help predict the sun’s magnetic activity and solar storms, making the telescope even more powerful once they’re brought online in the coming months, UH said Wednesday.

Plans are to have the telescope fully operational by June 30, Kuhn said. Once it’s up and running, the telescope will partner with space-based equipment to expand solar research and improve predictions of space weather.

“On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately, and space weather just isn’t there yet,” Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy that manages the Inouye Solar Telescope, said in a news release. “Our predictions lag behind terrestrial weather by 50 years, if not more. What we need is to grasp the underlying physics behind space weather, and this starts at the sun, which is what the Inouye Solar Telescope will study over the next decades.”

While heralded by the scientific community, the solar telescope is perhaps the most controversial of the observatories atop Haleakala. After the NSF’s National Solar Observatory began construction in 2012, hundreds of protesters gathered at the Central Maui baseyard in 2015 and along Haleakala Highway in 2017 to try and stop deliveries of parts up the mountain.

Native Hawaiian groups who say the telescope would desecrate a summit that many consider sacred have been challenging it in court as far back as 2009, until the Hawaii Supreme Court upheld a permit for the telescope in 2016.

As part of a mitigation plan, the NSF awarded a $20 million grant to UH-Maui College to engage Native Hawaiian students in pursuing STEM careers.

Kuhn said project investigators spent five years looking all over the globe for a place where the sky was dark enough, even during the day. Haleakala turned out to be the best site for viewing the sun, even more so than Mauna Kea, whose dusty environment makes the sky brighter.

“The reason why DKIST can do what it does is because of the magic of Haleakala,” Kuhn said.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.

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FEELING THE HEAT

How does the world’s largest solar telescope stay cool when looking into the sun? The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope atop Haleakala comes with an elaborate cooling system and state-of-the-art optics that compensate for blurring created by Earth’s atmosphere.

• Coolant. More than 7 miles of piping distributes coolant throughout the observatory, partially chilled by ice created on site during the night.

• Dome design. The dome enclosing the telescope is covered by thin cooling plates that stabilize the temperature around the telescope, while shutters within the dome provide shade and air circulation.

• Heat-stop. A high-tech, liquid-cooled metal donut known as the “heat-stop” only allows a narrow beam of light to pass through, cutting out more than 95 percent of the heat from the system.

“The focus of the telescope mirror is hot enough to melt metal,” said Inouye Solar Telescope Director Thomas Rimmele. “To deal with the heat, we make the equivalent of a swimming pool full of ice every night to provide cooling for the optics and structure during the day.”

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