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Astronomers have revealed new processes that take place in the atmosphere of our sun, thanks to new exquisite images of the star.
Dirk Schmidt at the US National Solar Observatory and his colleagues used the solar telescope Goode in California to produce images. They used a technique known as an adaptive optics to eliminate the vagueness of the earth’s atmosphere when observing the sun, allowing them to observe the characteristics of the crown, the exterior atmosphere of the star.
“You see spectacular more details than it is unlikely that anyone who has seen before,” says Schmidt.
Plasma rivers in the crown of the sun
Schmidt et al./njit/nso/aura/nsf
These details include dancing plasma flows through the crown and plasma loops known as solar processing that separate and reform.
The images also show some of our best views of the coronal rain, plasma droplets the size of a city that falls on the surface of the sun while they cool and become densest. “They are drawn towards the surface of the sun by gravity,” explains Schmidt.
The observations were made in the summers of 2023 and 2024. We hope that some of the images could give us new information on the reasons why the crown of the sun is so hot than its surface – millions of degrees compared to thousands of degrees – a mystery that remains unresolved.
One possibility could be magnetic fields that slam in the crown of the sun. “In many images and films that we provide, you can see tangled and twisted structures and torsion movements with very small scales,” explains Schmidt, who could cause nanoflares that heat the crown.
Certain features of the images are a mystery, including a plasma fascinating which has turned into several spots. “We are currently lacking in a final explanation,” explains Schmidt. “I think it could be something new, and it will be exciting to see how other scientists collect it.”
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