Sweden’s new solar telescope on the Spanish island of La Palma grabbed the spotlight in ground-based Sun-gazing when it came on line this past spring. It’s likely to keep that honor for a few years, until it’s eclipsed by the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (see accompanying story).
With its 97-cm aperture and adaptive optics, the telescope boasts record resolution imaging of the Sun. “We have already reached 0.1 arcseconds resolution—this has never been achieved before with any other solar telescope,” says Göran Scharmer, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Solar Physics, which runs the telescope. For spectral and magnetic-field measurements, Scharmer adds, the resolution is expected to surpass 0.2 arcseconds. The telescope is intended mostly for exploring the small-scale magnetic fields of the Sun’s atmosphere and the spots on its surface. Spatially resolved solar spectra could also help to interpret integrated stellar spectra.
The new telescope’s...
