Stunning new NASA images reveal the Sun's wild side.
The images were taken by NASA's newest solar observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph; they showed the region between the Sun's fiery surface and its atmosphere is a much more "violent" place than researchers previously believed, a NASA news release reported.
"The quality of images and spectra we are receiving from IRIS is amazing," Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif, said. "And we're getting this kind of quality from a smaller, less expensive mission, which took only 44 months to build."
IRIS allowed the researchers to analyze the Sun's interface region, and determine how its "explosive" qualities worked to heat the outer solar atmosphere. It also helped the team gain insight into the role the Sun's lower atmosphere plays in accelerating solar wind and eruptive events.
IRIS was able to catch revealing images and spectra (how much of each light wavelength is present) that have never been seen before.
"We are seeing rich and unprecedented images of violent events in which gases are accelerated to very high velocities while being rapidly heated to hundreds of thousands of degrees," Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin. "These types of observations present significant challenges to current theoretical models."
The researchers were particularly interested in two types of events. The first is called "prominence," which are "cool regions within the interface region that appear as giant loops of solar material rising up above the solar surface," the news release reported.
The second, called a "spicule," is a monstrous fountain of gas as long as Earth that shoots out of solar system at 150,000 miles per hour. These events work to distribute energy and heat in the Sun's atmosphere. The evolution of the spicule's was shown (through the IRIS data) to be much more complicated than researchers had anticipated.
"We see discrepancies between these observations and the models and that is great news for advancing knowledge," Mats Carlsson, an astrophysicist at the University of Oslo in Norway, said. "By seeing something we don't understand we have a chance of learning something new."
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