New images find mountains on sun's surface
  December 18, 1996
  3.31 am EST (0831 GMT)

  SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The sun is covered by mountains of hot gases that
  are less than a mile tall but up to 40,000 miles wide, according to
  brand new images.

  "The sun has mountains. These bumps are about five times the diameter
  of Earth,'' Jeffrey R. Kuhn, a solar physicist from Michigan State
  University and the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, N.M., said
  Tuesday.

  However, the mountains are only about a third of a mile high, he said.

  Kuhn announced his results at the American Geophysical Union fall
  meeting, before colleagues had a chance to study them -- or before
  NASA, which funds some of the solar physics research, could announce it
  with any fanfare.

  "Some of us have seen it for the first time today. I'm just very
  surprised at the result,'' said Ed Rhodes, a helioseismologist at the
  University of Southern California. "I don't think this is at all
  impossible. I think it's potentially very exciting.''

  The images were captured by the Michelson Doppler Imager, an instrument
  that can detect an object the size of a quarter at the edge of the moon
  from Earth.

  It is one of a dozen instruments carried aboard the Solar and
  Heliospheric Observatory, a joint U.S.-European space mission launched
  on Dec. 2, 1995.

  The imager detected about 60 bumps along the curve of the sun's
  profile; because it only can see the edges, there are likely hundreds
  of mountains of gases on the sun.

  Kuhn said the gaps between the mountains are as wide as the mountains
  themselves -- or about five times Earth's diameter of 7,926 miles. The
  sun is nearly 1 million miles across.

  Kuhn suspects the interaction of boiling gases and the sun's powerful
  magnetic field is forming the masses.

  The $75 million imager, built by Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif.,
  and developed by the Stanford Lockheed Institute for Space Research,
  makes highly sensitive measurements of sound waves every 12 minutes to
  detect the shape of the sun.

  The instrument also showed that contrary to some theories, the sun is
  almost a perfect sphere. The instrument found that it's distorted by
  only about one mile of its nearly 1 million-mile diameter.

  The imager, one of three U.S. instruments aboard the 2-ton spacecraft,
  began an expected two years of operation last May.