A team of international scientists used NASA's High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) to capture the sharpest ever images of the Sun's outer atmosphere.
A team of international scientists from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) captured images of Sun's outer atmosphere that were five times sharper than previous images. They did this using NASA's High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C), an experimental camera launched on a short-lived rocket.
The discovery will be reported at the UK National Astronomy Meeting.
Though the camera returned with only five minutes of data, scientists were able to detect a new phenomenon taking place in the Sun, which they refer to as "sparkles." These are bright points that appear along magnetic field lines where huge amounts of energy are released.
The Sun was observed in extreme ultraviolet light and the camera was able to detect small clumps of electrified gas that could possibly be one million degrees Celsius. The material flows inside a so-called solar filament, a region of dense plasma that can erupt outwards from the Sun and the phenomenon is known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They carry billions of tons of plasma into space.
This newly discovered phenomenon could help scientists better understand as to why the Sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona is much hotter than its surface.
"The corona is millions of degrees hotter, and this has been a decades' long puzzle," Prof Robert Walsh from the University of Central Lancashire told BBC. "The sparkles - we actually call them extreme ultraviolet dots - we believe are evidence of very localized but frequent energy release that could build up and heat the corona very easily."
The "sparkles" appear as small dots in the video provided and appear for less than 25 seconds, scientists stated that in reality the dots are bigger than the United Kingdom. They are about 680 km across and release millions of Joules of energy, which is approximately 10,000 times the annual energy consumption of the population of UK.
