Sun ID: 13691

NASA’s IRIS spots Nanojets: Shining light on heating the solar corona

Released on September 21, 2020

In pursuit of understanding why the Sun's atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface, and to help differentiate between a host of theories about what causes this heating, researchers turn to NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission. IRIS was finely tuned with a high-resolution imager to zoom in on specific hard-to-see events on the Sun.

A paper published in Nature on Sept. 21, 2020, reports on the first ever clear images of nanojets — bright, thin lights that travel perpendicular to magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere called the corona — in a process that reveals the existence of one of the potential coronal heating candidates: nanoflares.

Source Material

Credits

Scientist:
Patrick Antolin (Northumbria University)

Data Visualizer:
Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)

Producer:
Joy Ng (USRA)

Writer:
Susannah Darling (ADNET)

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center