The solar corona as a research area focuses on the physical processes governing the Sun’s outer atmosphere, characterized by low densities, high temperatures (∼10⁶ K), and complex magnetic structures. It integrates observational solar physics, plasma astrophysics, and magnetohydrodynamics to study coronal heating, magnetic reconnection, wave propagation, flares, and coronal mass ejections. Research emphasizes multi-wavelength diagnostics (EUV, X-ray, radio), spectropolarimetry, and numerical modeling to infer coronal magnetic fields, energy transport, and particle acceleration. This domain is central to understanding space weather, heliospheric conditions, and the coupling between the photosphere, chromosphere, and interplanetary medium.
After less than a year in orbit, the Southwest Research Institute-built PUNCH spacecraft have made major accomplishments, imaging the sun in context while tracking comets and enormous space weather events as they traveled ...
Astronomy
Dec 16, 2025
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Astronomers have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the sun's atmosphere, a shifting, frothy boundary that marks where solar winds escape the sun's magnetic grasp. By combining the maps ...
Astronomy
Dec 11, 2025
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Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in solar physics by providing the first direct evidence of small-scale torsional Alfvén waves in the sun's corona—elusive magnetic waves that scientists have been searching for since ...
Astronomy
Oct 24, 2025
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In recent years, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has given us a close-up look at the sun. Among the probe's revelations was the presence of numerous kinks, or "switchbacks," in magnetic field lines in the sun's outer atmosphere. ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 8, 2025
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2118
It rains on the sun, and thanks to researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA), we finally know why. Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the sun's corona, a region ...
Astronomy
Oct 1, 2025
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Investigating solar corona structures has led Paul Bellan, Caltech professor of applied physics, and his former graduate student Yang Zhang (Ph.D. '24) to discover a new equilibrium state of the magnetic field and its associated ...
General Physics
Aug 25, 2025
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During a solar eclipse, astronomers who study heliophysics are able to study the sun's corona—its outer atmosphere—in ways they are unable to do at any other time.
Astronomy
Aug 4, 2025
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U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) detailed an inverse relationship between the brightness of the solar corona and the velocity of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on July ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 15, 2025
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54
On its record-breaking pass by the sun late last year, NASA's Parker Solar Probe captured stunning new images from within the sun's atmosphere. These newly released images—taken closer to the sun than we've ever been before—are ...
Astronomy
Jul 14, 2025
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65
Recreating artificial solar eclipses in space could help astronomers decipher the inner workings of our sun much quicker than if they had to wait for the celestial show on Earth.
Astronomy
Jul 8, 2025
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