See the sun's freckles closer than ever

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OYour Greeting Sun welcomes a lot of fiery agitation. The interior of the star contains swirling and electric loaded gas called plasma. All this hubbub stretches intense magnetic fields. When the fluid plasma gets tangled from the magnetic field lines, it can prevent heat from climbing on the surface, which creates freckles on the sun, known to scientists in the form of solar spots. These spots are darker and colder that the rest of the surface of the star, generally around a fresh fahrenheit of 6,000 degrees compared to the 10,000 degrees medium fahrenheit.

The number of solar spots varies throughout the sun cycle of the sun: every 11 years, the magnetic field of the sun is reversed and holds the supractive star towards a minimum of activity. Astronomers keep an eye on solar spots to assess where the sun is in this cycle – at the height of solar activity, they will see the most freckles. A reversal of the magnetic field is a major eventThis can cause stormy space time and interfere with earth communication systems.

But most telescopes find it difficult to capture these spots with just the right amount of details and range. The heaviest and most powerful solar telescopes can make the most tiny details visible on the surface of the sun, but they tend to have a narrow field of vision, so they lack the situation as a whole. Meanwhile, smaller and less powerful telescopes can often observe the whole visible sun, but they cannot enlarge the nity-Gritty on the surface of the star, including solar spots and mobile plasma.

Bodily — **See spots:** A solar spot from a single image of the sun, taken by the telescope of the vacuum tower. On the left, an image of the newly improved telescope. On the right, the view was treated from 100 exhibitions using a physics based model. *Image of R. Kamlah et al. 2025.*

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Enter the vacuum tower telescope on the Spanish island of Tenerife, off the coast of West Africa. As this image shows, the telescope has both a large field of vision and a clear spatial resolution: slamming the difference in the solar telescope. Thanks to a new brilliant camera system from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, the telescope offers unprecedented images of the sun. Using this system, the researchers could theoretically see the details of a piece in the hand with more than a mile distance, explains the astrophysicist Carsten Denker of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in an email.

The vacuum tower telescope can now also capture large expanses of the sun, around 124,000 miles in diameter, compared to an average for most large telescopes of around 46,000 miles in diameter. Using special filters, the vacuum tower telescope can capture even the most tiny traces of magnetic fields, which appear as vibrant structures. “We teach an old telescope new tips to an old telescope, said Carsten Denker, head of the solar physics section of the Leibniz Institute for the Astrophysics Potsdam, in a statement.

Image of lead: a high resolution image rebuilt from 100 solar images captured by the new advanced camera system. The details are much sharper than most telescope snapshots. The image section corresponds to around 124,000 Miles through the solar surface. Image of R. Kamlah et al. 2025.