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NASA High Resolution Coronal Imager
SCORCHING hot and blazing bright, this extraordinary image of the sun鈥檚 corona reveals previously unseen parts of the atmosphere of our closest star.
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This isn鈥檛 our first glimpse of the sun鈥檚 surface in recent months. In January, for example, we saw it in unprecedented detail thanks to images taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the largest of its kind in the world.
But this latest picture is our closest look yet at the sun鈥檚 corona, its ultra-hot outer layer. It was captured by an international team, including researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and NASA鈥檚 Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, using NASA鈥檚 High Resolution Coronal Imager. This suborbital telescope can view objects in the sun鈥檚 atmosphere that are less than 1 per cent of its size.
The newly discovered orange swirls (below) are 500-kilometre-wide magnetic threads that are filled with plasma, electrified gases flowing at 1 million 掳C. We don鈥檛 know how these threads form, but the researchers say that now we can visualise them, they could help us learn how our star鈥檚 magnetic atmosphere causes solar storms and flares, activities that can affect us on Earth.
