Spacecraft Offers Astonishing Views into Sun’s Shell | NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory & Atmospheric Imaging Assembly
This zoomed-in image shows how the Sun's magnetic field shapes hot coronal plasma. Photos like this highlight the ever-changing connections between gas captured by the Sun's magnetic field and gas escaping into interplanetary space.
NASA/LMSAL/SAO
A NASA spacecraft is giving scientists great looks at parts of the sun's superhot atmosphere that had previously evaded detailed study.
The outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, called the corona, is hotter than the solar surface, but its tenuous light gets swamped by the much brighter solar disk. Historically, researchers have studied the corona during eclipses, when the moon blocks out the disk and reveals the corona, or by using an instrument called a coronagraph, which similarly blocks out the sun's disk.
However, eclipses are relatively rare and don't last long, and coronagraphs occlude the inner parts of the corona. Now, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatoryis helping scientists overcome these problems, yielding unprecedented views of the [...]
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