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Look at the picture below of an African landscape. The Sun plays a major role. How?
Its shape fills the sky. Its rays light the tree from behind, making it appear as a silhouette (outline). Its heat evaporates moisture, leaving the earth dry and dusty. Its heat also reflects light, making things look hazy and wavy.
Invisible Light
The light that comes from the Sun travels in waves. The light that we see (visible light) comes from light waves. But the Sun also produces light in waves that we can’t see, such as ultraviolet (UV) and infrared. Scientists have developed ways to detect the invisible light. This allows them to study the different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere. Four of the pictures above are of the Sun as seen through a telescope that filtered out everything but the UV light waves.
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▲ “Don’t look directly at the Sun!” How many times have you heard this warning? Now the National Science Foundation’s Inouye Solar Telescope at the top of Haleakala, an ancient volcano in Hawaii, can do it for you.
In January 2020, the NSF published the first photos and videos from the telescope. What do they show? A star made up of cells, or compartments, of churning plasma. (Plasma is a gas. It has so much heat and energy that its atoms fly off in all directions.)
Each cell is about as big as Texas. Within it, plasma rises from the very center of the Sun. It cools as it reaches outward, and then sinks. The movement is very much like water in a pot that heats to a boil, rises to the top, cools, and then falls, only to heat and rise again. If you look closely at the video, you’ll see that the center of each cell, where the plasma churns, is bright yellow. The part that looks like the cell wall, or border, is where the plasma cools and sinks.
Imagine a telescope that can capture all this detail of an object 93 million miles away.
