Nearly 5,000 kilometers above the sun's surface lies a century-old question for solar physicists—how are temperatures in the star's upper atmosphere (corona) hundreds of times hotter than temperatures at the sun's visible ...
Astronomy
Jun 14, 2023
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The further we move away from a heat source, the cooler the air gets. Bizarrely, the same can't be said for the sun, but University of Otago scientists may have just explained a key part of why.
Astronomy
Mar 24, 2022
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The visible surface of the sun, or the photosphere, is around 6,000°C. But a few thousand kilometers above it—a small distance when we consider the size of the sun—the solar atmosphere, also called the corona, is hundreds ...
Astronomy
May 25, 2021
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NASA is poised to launch a $1.5 billion spacecraft on a brutally hot journey toward the Sun, offering scientists the closest-ever view of our strange and mysterious star.
Space Exploration
Aug 8, 2018
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84
Something mysterious is going on at the Sun. In defiance of all logic, its atmosphere gets much, much hotter the farther it stretches from the Sun's blazing surface.
Space Exploration
Jul 27, 2018
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Like most solar sounding rockets, the second flight of the FOXSI instrument - short for Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager - lasted 15 minutes, with just six minutes of data collection. But in that short time, the cutting-edge ...
Space Exploration
Oct 13, 2017
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14
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from the U.S., Japan and Switzerland has found possible evidence of a source of energy that could be responsible for heating the sun's corona. In their paper published in the journal Nature ...
A NASA-funded sounding rocket is getting ready to launch to give insight into one of the biggest mysteries in solar physics—the fact the sun's atmosphere is some 1,000 times hotter than its surface. The mission, developed ...
Space Exploration
Aug 24, 2015
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Solar physicists have captured the first direct observational signatures of resonant absorption, thought to play an important role in solving the "coronal heating problem" which has defied explanation for over 70 years.
Space Exploration
Aug 23, 2015
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For the first time, a mission designed to set its eyes on black holes and other objects far from our solar system has turned its gaze back closer to home, capturing images of our sun. NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope ...
Space Exploration
Dec 23, 2014
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