NJIT: Solar Images Peel Away Layers of a Stellar Mystery

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NJIT: Solar Images Peel Away Layers of a Stellar Mystery

Post by bystander » Mon Nov 18, 2019 7:01 pm

Images from Big Bear Solar Observatory
Peel Away Layers of a Stellar Mystery

New Jersey Institute of Technology | 2019 Nov 15
An international team of scientists ... has shed new light on one of the central mysteries of solar physics: how energy from the Sun is transferred to the star’s upper atmosphere, heating it to 1 million degrees Fahrenheit and higher in some regions, temperatures that are vastly hotter than the Sun's surface.

With new images from NJIT’s Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the researchers have revealed in groundbreaking, granular detail what appears to be a likely mechanism – jets of magnetized plasma known as spicules that spurt like geysers from the Sun’s upper atmosphere into the corona.

In a paper published today in the journal Science, the team describes key features of jet-like spicules that are in solar terms small-scale plasma structures, between 200 and 500 kilometers wide, that erupt continuously across the Sun’s expanse. The researchers also, for the first time, show where and how the jets are generated and the paths they travel, at speeds of around 100 kilometers per second in some cases, into the corona. ...

Generation of Solar Spicules and Subsequent Atmospheric Heating ~ Tanmoy Samanta et al
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