NASA Telescope Captures Detailed Images of Sun's Surface
One of NASA's rocket-borne cameras captured the sharpest images ever taken of the sun's scorching atmosphere.
The High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, telescope took detailed pictures of the sun's corona, the hot layer of gas that extends more than a million kilometers above the solar surface, according to Space.com.
The imager was placed on board a research rocket at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and flown to the edge of space. It was launched last July in order to take a series of pictures of the Sun which are now being studied.
The corona of the massive star is millions of degrees hotter than the layer of gas beneath it and scientists are trying to discover precisely why.
Jonathan Cirtain, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., commented that researchers have suspected that powerful magnetic fields are heating the corona.
"The Sun's atmosphere is just jam-packed full of magnetic field," said Cirtain, according to Nature.com.
The increased energy output resulted in a flaring corona that can reach 7 million degrees Fahrenheit, compared to a visible solar surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees.
Scientists were finally able to observe the transfer of energy from the magnetic field which helped them prove previously held theories on the subject.
"The dynamic behavior of the observed structures is interpreted as evidence for 'magnetic braiding', an effect in which small bundles of magnetic field become wrapped around each other owing to plasma motions at the solar surface," wrote Peter Cargill of Imperial College London, according to CNN.
With the new images, Cirtain said scientists will have a better ability to forecast space weather could mitigate solar storms' economic and societal impacts.
"With potential annual economic impacts of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars domestically during periods of high solar activity, accurate forecasts of the local space weather environment can possibly save billions for power systems, commercial aircraft and a number of other economic sectors," said Cirtain, according to The Huffington Post.
