too sweet Pussies We Episode 1. The Quest for Sunspots This is the Sun. And this is a Sunspot. Sunspots are dark structures on the surface of our star, generated by strong magnetic fields emerging from its interior. They were first discovered in Europe in the 17th century. Sunspots, Sunspots. Galileo was obsessed with these enigmatic structures. He observed and drew them over the course of a whole summer. He saw Sunspots move and evolve across the solar disk. He had discovered the rotation of the Sun. Galileo determined that Sunspots were part of the Sun. However, he could not investigate their features because he saw them just as blurry blocks on a bright background. His telescope was not large enough to resolve Sunspots. Galileo dreamed of being able to distinguish the fine structure of Sunspots to understand what they are. He would have needed a much larger telescope and advanced instrumentation to do so. Unfortunately, such a telescope was unthinkable in the 17th century. In 1868, in Chicago, George Ellery Hale was born. He was an astronomer who would revolutionize our understanding of Sunspots. Hale designed and built several large telescopes in the United States. One of Hale's biggest scientific achievements was to use instrumentation to observe spectral lines on the surface of the Sun. In the 17th century, the British physicist Isaac Newton showed that white light passing through a prism is decomposed into the different colors of the rainbow. If instead of a prism, we use a device with better resolution, we see black bands over the colors. These are spectral lines. By studying the spectral lines emitted by celestial objects, we can discover many things about them. They're chemical composition, they're temperatures, they're velocities, even their magnetic fields. Indeed, when a gas is under the effects of a magnetic field, its spectral lines split into two or more components. All this was already known by the time of Hale. He's great success was to design bigger and bigger spectrographs to observe spectral lines on the surface of the Sun. Hale observed double spectral lines in Sunspots, like the ones produced in the laboratory by strong magnetic fields. He discovered in 1908 that Sunspots have intense magnetic fields. However, he could not learn much more about magnetic fields in Sunspots. The apparatus he used to make spectra only allowed him to see the line splitting in the bigger Sunspots with very strong magnetic fields. To understand Sunspots, we need large telescopes and larger spectrographs capable of recording several spectral lines simultaneously. Unfortunately, such a telescope was unthinkable at the beginning of the 20th century. Thanks to the European solar telescope, we will be able to learn how magnetic field shaped Sunspots and other structures in the atmosphere of the Sun. Finally, the wishes of Galileo, Hale and so many others will be fulfilled.