The world's largest solar telescope has captured fine features on the sun in remarkable detail, including rare glimpses of decaying sunspots.
Perched atop a mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) has been eyeing the sun for the past year, collecting high-resolution data about the activity, or lack thereof, in the sun's three-layered atmosphere. Using this data, scientists hope to answer some of the biggest questions about the sun, like why its outer atmosphere, or corona, is much hotter than its visible surface and how its magnetic fields abruptly reshape and blast out powerful jets of plasma from the solar atmosphere.
