Media – Omani affairs
NuSTAR, a space X-ray telescope that usually detects objects outside our solar system, has been able to provide new insights about our sun, as NASA scientists have noticed in its latest images light never seen before radiating from it.
Using NeuSTAR (the first space telescope used for direct imaging of X-rays), the US space agency captured many X-rays emitted by the hotter material in our star’s atmosphere.
High-energy X-rays were observed in only a few locations, while lower-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light were detected across the entire face of the gas sphere.
Scientists hope the new views will help them solve one of the sun’s biggest mysteries: why its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees Celsius, at least about 100 times hotter than the surface.
Neustar usually spends its time investigating the mysteries of black holes, supernovae and other high-energy objects in space, but it can also search around to study our sun.
The high-energy X-rays seen by NeuSTAR are shown in blue, while the low-energy X-rays from the X-ray Telescope instrument on the Hinode spacecraft, named after the Japanese word for sunrise, are green.
Red colors show ultraviolet radiation from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Neustar collected 25 images of the sun last June, allowing NASA to compile them into one image showing different colored lights emanating from the surface.
NASA also collected observations from the JAXA’s Hinode mission, which is shown in green, and the Heliodynamics Observatory, which captured ultraviolet light, in red.
While astronomers are baffled by the source of the heat of the corona, the sun’s outermost layer, they speculate that it could come from small 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 hotter than the average temperature of the corona.
NASA said in a statement that regular flares are not frequent enough to keep the corona at the high temperatures that scientists observe, but nanoflares may occur more frequently, perhaps often enough to collectively heat the corona.
Individual nanoflares have not been observed due to the burning sunlight, but NeuSTAR can detect light from the high-temperature material thought to be produced when a large number of nanoflares occur close together.
This ability enables physicists to investigate how frequently nanoflares occur and how they release energy.
