NASA explain that the very first description in the West of the monstrously beautiful solar corona – the glorious plasma aura thatsurrounds our Sun – believably number from the writer , speaker , and satirist Lucien in the year 932 BCE . Hedescribedthe starring shimmer as “ a kind of light [ that ’s ] visible about the flange , which keeps the shadow [ of the Moon ] from being profound and absolute . ”
How times have changed . From textbook to resume tophotographs , our intellect of this awe - urge on phenomenon has been transformed over the 100 . Now , as revealed in a new field of study , we ’ve take some of the skilful images of it to date , those that have let on novel structures in the corona ; blot out fibril - corresponding dancers that ameliorate our intellect of the physic of theSun .
The Saint Ulmo’s fire ( “ crest ” ) , first named during the 1806 eclipse by Spanish astronomer José Joaquin de Ferrer , is magnetise . It ’s the outmost segment of the Sun ’s uncanny air , one with multiple sources of light – but light so blur that we can only properly see it when the Moon conveniently bar out the majority of the Sun ’s light .
stretch millions of kilometers into space , itstemperatureis of the order of several million degrees , far hotter than the surface of the Sun . It ’s a phantasmal inferno , but if you moved through it , its extremely low density mean you would n’t feel the heat .
There are indubitablymore questionsthan solution at present tense .
“ In deep space , the solar wind is turbulent and gusty , ” Craig DeForest – solar physicist at Southwest Research Institute ( SwRI ) , explain in apress release . “ But how did it get that way ? Did it leave the Sun smooth , and become turbulent as it crossed the Solar System , or are the gusts tell us about the Sun itself ? ”
Enter , NASA’sSTEREO ballistic capsule , a solar reflection mission comprised of two unintegrated scope . The SwRI at Boulder - led squad plough to STEREO - A – part one of two – which occupy long exposure of the Sun while behind it . long exposure boosted dimmer detail , but the team still had to deal with the inherently fuzzy resolution of the snaps .
Using some novel computational wizardry , the squad managed to filter out some of the additional stochasticity , create by the instrument itself , the Sun , and other electromagnetic disturbance from elsewhere in distance . The squad also had to take into account the hyperfast motions of the solar wind emerging from the Sun too to make certain their individual images matched up and did n’t have a vexatious fuzz .
Et voila : those ok structures were recorded . They ’ve been rather beautifully line as the “ cars ” of the corona , compared to the “ freeway traffic ” of the solar malarkey .
antecedently suspect the outer corposant to be a same - same smudge of stuff , the team were surprised to see any wavering patterns in the miasma at all . It appears that they ’re private component of larger structures namedcoronal streamer , closed magnetic loops that are often fairly lucent .
Another revelation involved theAlfven surface , a boundary beyond which any solar material is lost to space forever . The salient fresh images and processing , allow scientists to track the evolution of the corona like never before , found that the limit is n’t clean cut , but a wavering , blurrier geographical zone .
Perhaps most enigmatic of all is that , at a distance of around 10 solar radius , their image processing ca n’t resolve details anymore . Weirdly , at enceinte distances , they can again . This is n’t likely a computational trouble , but rather something far more exciting : a realm of the outer electric glow whose physic we have no understanding of whatsoever .
This is just the beginning . New image , more teams , and new spacecraft will peer into the Sun ’s crown , attempting to peel back the puzzling layers .
This new paper , though – published inThe Astrophysical Journal – play our greatest awareness of the corona to date , many millennia after we first described it shattering the lunar shadow .
