Stunning new photos of the SUN show fiery plasma flowing from a honeycomb-like pattern of pores

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking these photos as a close-up of a honeycomb-filled Crunchie chocolate bar.

But the images are actually from the world’s most powerful solar telescope and show the surface of the sun in incredible detail.

The new images come from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and show dramatic sunspots that are larger than Earth, including one in the shape of an eerie face.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) says the scenes are a preview of the “exciting science underway” at the world’s most powerful solar telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

They explain that the telescope’s unique ability to capture data in unprecedented detail will help solar scientists better understand the sun’s magnetic field and the drivers behind solar storms.

The new images come from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and show dramatic sunspots that are larger than Earth – including one in the shape of an eerie face

The National Science Foundation (NSF) says the scenes are a preview of the “exciting science on the way” at the world’s most powerful ground-based solar telescope, which is located on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

The recently inaugurated telescope is in the Operations Commissioning Phase (OCP), a learning and transition period as the observatory is slowly being brought up to its full operational capabilities.

The new images show a variety of sunspots and quiet regions of the sun obtained by the Visible-Broadband Imager (VBI), one of the telescope’s first-generation instruments.

The sunspots pictured are dark and cool regions on the Sun’s “surface,” known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields are present.

The photos represent a small fraction of the data obtained from the Observation Window of Cycle 1.

The Inouye Solar Telescope data center will continue to calibrate and provide data to scientists and the public.

As the telescope continues to explore the sun, more results will come from the scientific community, including “spectacular images of our solar system’s most influential celestial body.”

The new images show a variety of sunspots and quiet regions of the sun obtained by the Visible-Broadband Imager (VBI), one of the telescope’s first-generation instruments

As the Inouye Solar Telescope continues to explore the sun, more results will come from the scientific community, including “spectacular images of our solar system’s most influential celestial body”

The sunspots pictured are dark and cool areas on the sun’s “surface,” known as the photosphere, where strong magnetic fields persist

Sunspots vary in size, but many are often as large as Earth, if not even larger.

Complex sunspots or groups of sunspots can be the source of explosive events such as flares and coronal mass ejections that cause solar storms.

These energetic and eruptive phenomena affect the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer, the heliosphere, with the potential to affect Earth and our critical infrastructure.

In the quiet regions of the Sun, the images show convection cells in the photosphere displaying a bright pattern of hot, upward-flowing plasma (grains) surrounded by dark bands of cooler, downward-flowing solar plasma.

In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see dark, elongated fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field accumulations.

The telescope’s unique ability to capture data in unprecedented detail will help solar scientists better understand the sun’s magnetic field and the drivers behind solar storms

In the atmospheric layer above the photosphere, called the chromosphere, we see dark, elongated fibrils originating from locations of small-scale magnetic field accumulations.