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

  • Released Monday, September 21st, 2020
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:44PM
  • ID: 13691

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.

Watch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio

GIFThese images showing nanojets on the Sun were captured by NASA's IRIS mission on Apr. 3, 2014.

GIF

These images showing nanojets on the Sun were captured by NASA's IRIS mission on Apr. 3, 2014.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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