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WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 7
SUNSPOT
SNAPSHOT
The Inouye Solar
Telescope has
released its first
image of a sunspot.
Since it began operating in late
2019, the U.S. National Science
Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye
Solar Telescope — the world’s
largest solar observatory — has
been wowing the world with
close-up views of our star. Now,
the telescope has released its
first image of a sunspot. Such
spots, which appear on the sur-
face of the Sun where magnetic
field lines converge, look dark
because they are cooler than
their surroundings. But cool
is a relative term, as the center
of this sunspot is still hotter
than 7,500 degrees Fahrenheit
(4,150 degrees Celsius).
Measuring roughly 10,
miles (16,100 kilometers) across,
the sunspot is large enough to
encompass the entire Earth.
The close-up reveals structures
as small as 12 miles (20 km) in
size and shows the spot with a
resolution 2.5 times greater than
any previous image. This photo
was snapped in January 2020,
shortly after the Sun reached
solar minimum. But now that
the Sun’s activity is ramping up
again, researchers are eager to
observe more sunspots with this
new level of detail to learn more
about the processes that shape
our star’s activity. — ALISON KLESMANROCKET ORIGAMI
Borrowing techniques
from the Japanese
art of paper-folding,
researchers at
Washington State
University have created
a prototype plastic
bladder that won’t
crack while pumping
liquid fuel at ultracold
temperatures.BYE-BYE BLACK HOLE
The Hubble and
Chandra space
telescopes failed to
find a supermassive
black hole expected
to lurk in the central
galaxy of the cluster
Abell 2261, suggesting
a galactic merger
ejected the black hole.BENT OUT OF SHAPE
New research suggests
the disk of our galaxy
was violently warped
by the Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC) some
700 million years
ago. The LMC is still
influencing the Milky
Way, pulling our galaxy
in the direction of the
constellation Pegasus.HOT
BYTESSNAPSHOT
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