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I have photographed for Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia these worrying spots on the sun observed this morning from Gavà beach.
You can also see the plane with the image of these sunspots that so much concern NASA and the entire scientific community. They are large spots, which can be seen with the eye from the camera’s viewfinder, without the need for a telescope.
Apparently, there is a lot of concern from the entire scientific community about its size. And it is that they can affect radio communications, electricity networks, the internet, air and land navigation signals, as well as they can present very important risks for astronauts. Alert, then, for sunspots.
Just this week, the NSF’s (National Science Foundation) brand new Inouye Solar Telescope has released eight new images of the Sun showing a variety of sunspots and quiet regions.
The first data preview from the world’s most powerful ground-based solar telescope, located in Hawaii, was obtained by the Visible-Broadband Imager (VBI), one of the telescope’s first-generation instruments. Their observations will help solar scientists better understand the Sun’s magnetic field and the drivers of solar storms.
The depicted sunspots are dark, cool regions on the Sun’s “surface,” known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields persist. Sunspots vary in size, but many are often the size of Earth, if not larger.
Complex sunspots or sunspot groups can be the source of explosive events such as flares and coronal mass ejections that generate solar storms.
These energetic and eruptive phenomena influence the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the heliosphere, with the potential to impact Earth and our critical infrastructure, the NSF explains in a statement.
In quiet regions of the Sun, images show convective cells in the photosphere showing a bright pattern of upward-flowing hot plasma (granules) surrounded by darker lanes of cooler solar plasma.
In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see elongated, dark fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field clumps.
