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Nov.
17, 2006: To appreciate the majesty and power of
a typical G-type star, you need only glance at this photo:
Above:
Mercury and the Sun, the view through Hinode's X-ray Telescope.
The arrow points to Mercury. [Zoom]
[More]
The
tiny black speck is Mercury. The star looming in the background
is our own sun.
The
Japanese Space Agency's new orbiting solar observatory, Hinode
(formerly known as Solar B), took the picture on Nov. 8th
just as Mercury was about to begin a rare solar transit. Thousands
of people on Earth saw and photographed the event, but Hinode's
photo is like no other because it shows the view through an
X-ray telescope.
"Hinode's
X-ray telescope, the XRT, is the best solar X-ray telescope
ever flown," says John Davis, NASA's Hinode project scientist
at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The XRT has arc-second
resolution and can take pictures as rapidly as once every second."
X-rays
interest solar physicists because they reveal the hottest
gases in the sun's atmosphere. The bright flourish just above
Mercury, for instance, is a gigantic mass of million-degree
plasma trapped in the magnetic field of a sunspot. Viewed
through an ordinary white light telescope, that hot mass would
be almost completely invisible.
Truly,
"these are unique images," says Davis.
When
the transit began, that is, when Mercury moved directly in
front of the sun's surface, Hinode zoomed in using another
of its telescopes, the SOT (Solar Optical Telescope). The
images reveal Mercury as no mere speck but a full-fledged
planetary disk:
Movies:
larger
(20 MB) or smaller
(1 MB)
Viewing
the movie, Davis points out "the motions in the background."
The sun's surface boils like water atop a hot stove. Each
of the bubbling "granules" is about the size of
a terrestrial continent.
Hinode,
just launched in September, is still in the shake-down phase
of its mission. Ground controllers are testing Hinode's telescopes
and other systems and don't expect to begin routine science
operations until next month. The transit of Mercury is just
a hint of what's to come.
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Author: Dr. Tony Phillips
| Editor: Dr.
Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA
Hinode
is a joint mission of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
(JAXA), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ),
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and
the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).
The Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) manages Hinode science
operations for NASA and is also supporting science operations
in Japan.
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