Tiny Flares Responsible for Outsized Heat of Sun's Atmosphere

(PhysOrg.com) -- Solar physicists at NASA have confirmed that small, sudden bursts of heat and energy, called nanoflares, cause temperatures in the thin, translucent gas of the sun's atmosphere to reach millions of degrees.

Tiny "nanoflares" might heat the Sun's corona

Why is the Sun's million-degree corona, or outermost atmosphere, so much hotter than the Sun's surface? This question has baffled astronomers for decades. Today, a team led by Paola Testa of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center ...

Heating the solar corona

The hot outer layer of the sun, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, much more than the surface temperature of the Sun which is only about 5500 degrees Kelvin. Moreover, the corona is very active ...

Small-scale magnetism leads to large-scale solar atmosphere

Thanks to close-up images of the sun obtained during Solar Orbiter's perihelion passage of October 2022, solar physicists have seen how fleeting magnetic fields at the solar surface build up into the solar atmosphere.

Image: Coronal loops in an active region of the sun

An active region of the sun just rotating into the view of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory gives a profile view of coronal loops over about a two-day period, from Feb. 8-10, 2014.

Sunrise II: A second look at the Sun

scillating fibrils, explosive increases in temperature, and the footprints of coronal loops: 13 articles published today provide an overview of the results of the second flight of the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise.

Image: Coronal loops over a sunspot group

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) images the solar atmosphere in multiple wavelengths to link changes in the surface to interior changes. Its data includes images ...

Heliophysics nugget: Gradient sun

(Phys.org)—Heliophysics nuggets are a collection of early science results, research techniques and instrument updates that further our attempt to understand the sun and the dynamic space weather system that surrounds Earth.

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