New Delhi : It’s magnificent to learn more about the sun and how it has created the atmosphere around it.

Europe’s largest Solar Telescope, GREGOR, enables scientists to determine subtleties as little as 50 km on the Sun, which is a tiny portion of the solar diameter of 1.4 million km.

The scientists have released the close-up images of the Sun clicked from the telescope, which are nothing but terrifying. Operated by a German scientist at the Teide Observatory in Spain, the telescope has obtained new high-resolution images of the Sun’s intricate structure — the best captured by a European telescope.

Dr. Lucia Kleint, who led the project and the German solar telescopes on Tenerife, said, “This was a fascinating and extremely challenging project. We completely redesigned the optics, mechanics, and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality in only one year. The project team achieved a major technical breakthrough in March this year, during the lockdown when they were stranded at the observatory and set up the optical laboratory from the ground up. Unfortunately, snow storms prevented solar observations. When Spain reopened in July, the team immediately flew back and obtained the Sun’s highest resolution images ever taken by a European telescope.”

Prof. Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina, professor at the Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg and Director of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS), said, “The project was rather risky because such telescope upgrades usually take years, but the great teamwork and meticulous planning have led to this success. Now we have a powerful instrument to solve puzzles on the Sun.”

The telescope was first inaugurated in 2012 and the upgrade process was completed in the year 2018. The updated version allows scientists to learn magnetic fields, convection, turbulence, solar eruptions, and sunspots in great detail.

Check out the images below:

(Image: KIS)

(Image: KIS)