14 DAY TRIAL // This has left the astronomers deeply amazed. The data gathered by the Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft, launched in September 2006 for investigating sunspots and solar storms revealed surprising images.
Saku Tsuneta, Hinode's chief scientist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo, presented last week a movie of sunspot 10926 breaking through the turbulent surface of the sun in an audience of about 200 astronomers reunited at the "Living with a Star" workshop in Boulder, Colorado. The amazing spot as big as a planet took forms that the audience was not prepared for.
"It looks like a prehistoric trilobite," said Marc De Rosa, a scientist from Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.
"We've never seen anything quite like it. To me it seemed more like cellular mitosis in which duplicated chromosomes self-assemble into two daughter cells," said solar physicist Lika Guhathakurta from NASA headquarters.
"This movie is a magnetogram-a dynamic map tracing the sunspot's intense magnetism. Black represents negative (S) polarity, and white represents positive (N)." she explained.
"This is the highest resolution magnetogram ever taken from space. It's showing us things we've never seen before." said Tsuneta.
There's no better way of investigating the sunspots, as they are not solid, made of matter, but magnetism knots induced by the star's inner dynamo. They appear in the depths and emerge to the solar surface where they can change, merge, split or even "swim."
"Sometimes the shifting and merging gets out of hand. Magnetic fields become unstable and explode, producing a powerful solar flare," said Guhathakurta.
The solar spots affect deeply our lives: they disrupt communications on Earth, impair satellite activity, threaten astronauts' life with deadly radiation storms but also induce fascinating aurora borealis and australis in the polar regions. Forecasting the flares is still out of reach and this information would be crucial for astronauts on the way to the Moon. Hinode's mission is trying to improve this, with amazingly quality images.
"The sensitivity of Hinode's Solar Optical Telescope is much higher than anything we've ever launched before. This allows Hinode to detect even the very faintest magnetic fields. By watching the ebb and flow of magnetism and the surprising forms that emerge, we hope to understand the behavior of sunspots and predict their eruptions."
You can watch the amazing sunspot here.