Sun’s new images by NASA with more information on interface region
(Image Credit: NASA/LMSAL/IRIS)
Main Point:
In the recent images and data revealed by NASA, the interface region, i.e. region between the surface of the sun and its atmosphere, is found to be more violent than previous findings.
Study Further:
These images and data have been taken with NASA’s newest solar observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) that was launched on June 27, 2013, to study the interface region. Since then, IRIS has revealed many detailed images of sun’s interface region showing the explosive phenomena (for the first time) in it giving astronomers more detailed information about the interface.
(Image Credit: NASA)
“The quality of images and spectra we are receiving from IRIS is amazing,” said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif. “And we’re getting this kind of quality from a smaller, less expensive mission, which took only 44 months to build.”
“We are seeing rich and unprecedented images of violent events in which gases are accelerated to very high velocities while being rapidly heated to hundreds of thousands of degrees,” said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin. “These types of observations present significant challenges to current theoretical models.”
IRIS scientists showed the mission’s early observations at a press conference at the Fall American Geophysical Union meeting on Dec. 9, 2013.
You can see the presentation with images on AGU – IRIS Presentation (pdf).
Source:
IRIS Provides Unprecedented Images of Sun – NASA (http://goo.gl/foKhrE)
