Posted: Thu, Nov 14, 2002, 8:30 AM ET (1330 GMT)
A new Swedish telescope has taken the sharpest images to date of the Sun, astronomers announced this week. In a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Nature, scientists released the first images taken by the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The telescope uses adaptive optics, like other new telescopes, to correct for the blurring effects of the atmosphere, generating images with a resolution of 100 kilometers per pixel. Among the details found in the images are dark, thin cores in filaments of matter surrounding sunspots; the nature of these filaments are unknown.

Related Links:

•  Institute for Solar Physics press release
•  BBC article
•  SPACE.com article
•  New Scientist article
•  Sky and Telescope article