NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) has provided new insight into how the sun's atmosphere heats up faster than its surface. This phenomenon causes the constant outflow of particles that is solar wind.
The new findings could help researchers gain a better understanding of how the sun transfers energy through its atmosphere, allowing them to track solar energy that can harm technology both in space and on Earth, NASA reported.
"These findings reveal a region of the sun more complicated than previously thought," said Jeff Newmark, interim director for the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Combining IRIS data with observations from other Heliophysics missions is enabling breakthroughs in our understanding of the sun and its interactions with the solar system."
The researchers identified heat pockets that reached 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit lower in the solar atmosphere than has ever been observed in the past. These pockets of heat can release enormous amounts of energy in short periods of time, and identifying the source of the phenomenon could help researchers gain insight into the solar mechanism that heats the entire solar system.
The team also identified "low lying loops of solar material" in the sun's interface for the first time; this finding could help researchers determine how the solar atmosphere is energized.
A third fascinating finding was the sighting of structures resembling mini-tornadoes that move as fast as 12 miles per second. These tornadoes are believed to transfer energy to the sun's corona. The team also pinpointed high-speed jets as the root of solar winds. Large solar flares, initiated by a mechanism called magnetic reconnection, are believed to send particles to space at the speed of light.
"This research really delivers on the promise of IRIS, which has been looking at a region of the sun with a level of detail that has never been done before," said De Pontieu, IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif. "The results focus on a lot of things that have been puzzling for a long time and they also offer some complete surprises."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
