![]() The lead author of this Science paper is Dr. Spicules are extremely common on the Sun and, although they have been considered as prime candidates as a coronal heating mechanism since the 1960s, their low temperature seemed to rule them out. These whiskers on the sun are known as spicules, and they're understood to be fountains of relatively cool, 10,000° plasma that shoots up from the Sun's interior and reach its outer atmosphere. In 1877, tendrils were seen on the Sun's surface that wavered from side to side like a field of wheat in a gentle breeze. ![]() Beyond good science, the recently launched SDO satellite has been taking some fabulous pictures of our Sun.Ī solar phenomena we observed a long time ago turns out to be the cause of hot plasma in the solar corona. A paper published in Science reports on observations obtained with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and NASA’s Focal Plane Package for the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on the Japanese Hinode satellite. These observations are revealing a compelling link between the coronal plasma that is heated to millions of degrees and ubiquitous, ephemeral jets that reach into corona. New solar missions, designed to take the surprises out of living next to a star, are reaching the point where they have the spatial and temporal resolution to observe previously hidden solar phenomena. One generic explanation has been that magnetic fields must be involved, but getting beyond this superficial understanding has required more detailed observations. Why the tenuous atmosphere above the sun is hotter than the actual surface has remained a mystery. The corona is a wispy plasma envelope extending millions of miles above the Sun's surface. But travel to the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, and it heats up to millions of degrees again. The Sun's core is millions of degrees, while the solar surface is a balmy 5800 kelvin.
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