Solar Optical Telescope will orbit on space shuttle
SEP 01, 1982
DOI: 10.1063/1.2915255
To the naive outsider it seems surprising that solar astronomers complain of being hampered by the inadequate spatial resolution of their telescopes. The Sun is, after all, only eight light minutes away, and most of us don’t think of it as possessing small‐scale surface features beyond our powers of resolution. Sunspots were studied by Galileo almost four hundred years ago. But in fact, magnetohydrodynamic mechanisms with characteristic scales of 70 km or less appear to be crucial to our understanding of the astrophysics of our nearest star.
© 1982. American Institute of Physics
