According to RT, the many telescopes in orbit have made it possible to study the sun, and it is he who continues to keep more secrets from scientists.
NuSTAR, an X-ray space telescope that normally observes objects outside our solar system, has been able to provide new insights into our sun, as NASA scientists have captured unprecedented light radiating from the sun in their latest image.
Using NeuSTAR (the first space telescope to directly image X-rays), the US space agency has imaged many of the X-rays emitted by the hotter material in our star’s atmosphere.
High-energy X-rays were observed only in a few places, while lower-energy and ultraviolet X-rays were detected all over the surface of the gas ball.
Scientists hope the new views will help them solve one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: why the outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees Celsius, at least 100 times hotter than the surface.
NeuSTAR usually spends its time searching for the mysteries of black holes, supernovae, and other energetic objects in space, but it can also look around to study our sun.
High-energy X-rays seen by NeuSTAR appear in blue, while lower-energy X-rays from the spacecraft’s Hinode X-ray Telescope instrument, named following the Japanese word for sunrise, appear in green.
Red colors indicate ultraviolet radiation from NASA’s Heliodynamics Observatory.
Neustar collected 25 images of the Sun last June, allowing NASA to combine them into a single image that shows the different colored lights emanating from the surface.
NASA also combined observations of JAXA’s Hinode mission, shown in green, and the Heliodynamics Observatory, which captured ultraviolet light in red.
While astronomers have puzzled over the source of the heat in the corona, the sun’s outermost layer, they speculate that it might come from tiny volcanic eruptions in the sun’s atmosphere called nanoflares.
These flares are large bursts of heat, light and particles that are visible to a wide variety of solar observatories.
While nanoflares are much smaller events, both types produce material that is hotter than the average corona temperature.
Normal flares are not frequent enough to sustain the corona at the high temperatures observed by scientists, NASA said in a statement, but nanoflares may occur often, perhaps often enough to collectively heat the corona.
Individual nanoflares have not been observed due to burning sunlight, but NeuSTAR can detect light from high-temperature materials thought to be produced when large numbers of nanoflares reside close together.
This ability enables physicists to investigate how often nanoflares occur and how they release energy.
