How High-Speed Helps to Reduce the Effects of Atmospheric Distortion
Located on the Canary Island of La Palma, the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope (SST) is the world’s leading facility for high resolution observations of the Sun. It is operated by the Institute for Solar Physics(ISF), which is part of Stockholm University’s department for Astrophysics. Research at the institute primarily aims to gain knowledge about the outer layer of the solar atmosphere, which is dominated by magnetic fields. How do magnetic fields arise? How are they formed and ultimately destroyed or removed from the solar surface? How do they affect the Sun‘s outer atmosphere? How do they give rise to solar storms and the radiant energy that the Sun emits?
These questions are explored using observational data registered with the Swedish Solar Telescope. The telescope system looks at 60 x 60 arc-seconds of the Sun, which equals 43,320 x 43,320 km on the solar surface. This is an area that is more than three times bigger than the Earth’s surface but represents only 0.03% of the Sun’s surface.
