A key mystery about the sun is close to being solved by scientists.
The solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flows off the sun, is thought to form in the middle of the sun's middle atmosphere. A NASA mission will be launched next year after the finding of an elusive region of the sun.
One of the study's authors, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said they had no idea if the experiment would work. The results were very good. We have high-quality observations that unite our observations of the sun and the heliosphere.
The world's largest solar telescope took a picture of a mysterious region of the sun.
During total solar eclipses, the moon blocks out most of the sun's light and the corona is only visible to humans. There haven't been observations of the sun's corona at heights below 1.3 million miles, which is why the middle corona has been the least monitored.
In August 2021, researchers announced first-of- their-kind observations of the middle corona. Scientists used advanced instruments to find that solar wind structures originate in the middle corona. The first comprehensive insight into the emergence of solar winds was provided by this.
Space weather is a collection of ways that the sun and its eruptions can affect Earth. Adding noise to cell phone reception and knocking out power grids can be caused by space weather. Scientists don't understand the mechanisms that cause solar winds and other space weather, which makes it nearly impossible to forecast.
New observations combined with data from additional space probes and computer models have shown a complex corona.
An international team of researchers analyzed data from a month-long observation campaign using the solar ultra violet imager on the weather satellite. This region's structure and evolution were captured by the satellite's extended field of view.
"We had the chance to use an instrument in an unusual way to observe a region that has not really been explored," he said. We knew if it worked we'd make important discoveries.
The team was able to track a pair of coronal holes, patches of the sun that appear dark and mark where the sun's magnetic field is open to space and expelling material. The "S-web" was discovered when the sun's east and west edges were visible.
The web is made of magnets that are constantly interacting. The mechanism that sparked the solar wind streams was seen by researchers.
The findings from the study could be useful for the NASA mission to unify the corona and heliosphere. The goal of this two-year mission is to better understand how the corona creates solar wind.
"Now that we can image the sun's middle corona, we can connect what PUNCH sees back to its origins and have a more complete view of how the solar wind interacts with the rest of the solar system," he said. Prior to these observations, most people didn't think you could see the middle corona in the sun. The studies have given rise to a new approach to observing the corona.
There is a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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