WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 (UPI) — NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has taken its first photo of the sun.
The NuSTAR is an extremely powerful X-ray telescope made for taking pictures of black holes and other objects outside the solar system, but it was recently aimed at the sun.
The photo is actually a combination of two photos, with NuSTAR collecting the X-ray imagery and then that image was laid over the deep reds captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
“NuSTAR will give us a unique look at the sun, from the deepest to the highest parts of its atmosphere,” said David Smith, a solar physicist and member of the NuSTAR team at University of California, Santa Cruz.
NASA scientists hope to use such photos to learn why the sun’s outer atmosphere, corona, is 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit and the surface of the sun is only 10,800 Fahrenheit.
“NuSTAR will be exquisitely sensitive to the faintest X-ray activity happening in the solar atmosphere, and that includes possible nanoflares,” said Smith.
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