New adaptive optics shows details of our star's atmosphere
31 comments
·May 31, 2025itishappy
Utterly alien.
For reference, the field of view here is about 2.5x the diameter of the Earth. Astronomical scales remain mind bending to me.
jvanderbot
It's not even comprehendable for our brains. The scale, temperature, and velocities of these fluffy pixels is just enormous. It's high energy physics, CFD, all in real life and real time.
so-rose
What a time to be alive. I can look at my magic enchanted light-box and observe "rain" on the surface of the sun.
It's almost nice that mysteries remain - apparently, the physical mechanism behind solar spicules [1] remains "hotly" (!!) debated.
krunck
What fascinates me is the stable structure in the first video. Everything is so ephemeral yet that structure remains largely in place and in the same shape yet it's internals are seething.
srean
With NSO (not NSO.edu but the cyberweapons/malware company) there is a hidden tenuous pun.
Adaptive optics started in a secret space weaponry research funded by SDI.
When a few profs independently proposed the idea in their NSF research grant proposal they were told - we already know this stuff.
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-...
tomrod
This was beautiful!
tsujamin
You say beautiful, I say existentially terrifying, let’s split the difference
GolfPopper
I think that's why H.P. Lovecraft's work still resonates - he first captured that cosmic sense of horror that came with humanity starting to understand our place in the universe, and how tiny and insignificant it really is.
I caught some of that sense not too long ago, looking at the Moon with a new-to-me (amateur) telescope and wide-field eyepiece. Some combination of the seeing conditions and optics let my mind really connect with what I was seeing, in a way it never had before in decades of amateur astronomy. I understood that what I was looking at - grokked it, if you will allow - across an abyss that was incomprehensibly vast to me, but still only the tiniest of distances of the scale of the solar system, let alone the universe, was a whole other world, a vast globe of rock and dust, moving through the void, its mountains and valleys utterly empty of the air, water life that has always surrounded me.
My description doesn't really do it justice. It was the first time I'd ever really gotten a sense for the scales involved in my hobby, where what I was looking at felt real and not just an image through an eyepice and it made me catch my breath. Amazing, disturbing, and a little frightening all at once.
jvanderbot
Once, I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a university telescope. You know the kind with a motorized dome and car sized actuators and such.
It was so, so visible and yet so, so far. Somehow using all that power to see it in real time and still have it be small but look so insanely huge somehow.
I had this vertigo and the scale of the solar system kind of rushed at me. Just like you say.
itishappy
I feel like the moment you learn the relative scales, it's over, there's no going back.
There's a billion WWII ending atom bombs going off every day up there. How are we still ok?
wffurr
My preferred design for fusion reactors uses gravitational confinement and are placed 150 million miles away.
layer8
We would be much worse off without it.
tomrod
Distance squared law of gravity.
lazide
Hey, at least we can’t hear the screaming (/s).
Distance/dilution really is the solution eh? Besides, without all those fusion bombs going off our air would be liquid/solid, which is extremely inconvenient.
srean
There was this sci-fi story set on the sun. Humans interact with sentient plasma, some as old as the universe. Forgetting the name.
stevenwoo
Sundiver is most prominent in my recollection.
amelius
Soon coming to a fusion reactor near you.
ChuckMcM
Agreed, and for folks who can still remember some of Jackson's electrodynamics a really interesting visualization of field equations in "real" time.
doctorwho42
Lol, glad I'm not the only one thinking that way
whatshisface
If you like this, call your congressman.
ambicapter
They talk about creating an artificial star by stimulating light at 90km in the atmosphere, would it be useful to have a satellite that you can reposition that would shine a calibrated light source back at earth? I imagine you could also do some tricks with the light source to maybe get more accurate data about the atmospheric distortions.
vjvjvjvjghv
The satellite beam wouldn’t go through the parts of the atmosphere the telescope is pointing. You need to calibrate exactly for the spot the telescope is observing.
pyinstallwoes
Like the moon ?
jeremyscanvic
This is so exciting! My colleagues are doing research in astronomical imaging except on the more theoretical side of things - it's really neat to come across cool downstream applications like that!
kadushka
“Clearest images to date” - wouldn’t images taken from space, much closer to the sun, be clearer?
lmm
Depends, space telescopes tend to be smaller for obvious reasons. You might want to compare to the Parker Solar Probe's images like https://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Show-Article... .
casenmgreen
Blocks evil Tor users.
a-a--a--df-
[flagged]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02564-0
The paper has more details. What's interesting to me is that the key innovation isn't the deformable mirror but rather the design of a wavefront sensor that focuses on coronal features (instead of the "grain" on the solar surface prior systems used).