[h2 class="inline"]Dazzling new images reveal the 'impossible' on the Sun[/h2]The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode. [/p]The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday. [/p]"Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success." [/p]Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was [a href="vny!://space.newscientist.com/article/dn10143-spacecraft-launches-to-study-suns-magnetic-field.html"]launched[/a] in September 2006 to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere. The mission was formerly known as Solar-B.[/p]Full Story: [a href="vny!://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11432&feedId=online-news_rss20"]vny!://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11432&feedId=online-news_rss20[/a]
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