{ "count": 14, "next": null, "previous": null, "results": [ { "id": 12903, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12903/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2018-07-25T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Discovering the Sun’s Mysteriously Hot Atmosphere", "description": "Something mysterious is going on at the Sun. In defiance of all logic, its atmosphere gets much, much hotter the farther it stretches from the Sun’s blazing surface.Temperatures in the corona — the tenuous, outermost layer of the solar atmosphere — spike upwards of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, while just 1,000 miles below, the underlying surface simmers at a balmy 10,000 F. How the Sun manages this feat remains one of the greatest unanswered questions in astrophysics; scientists call it the coronal heating problem. A new, landmark mission, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe — scheduled to launch no earlier than Aug. 11, 2018 — will fly through the corona itself, seeking clues to its behavior and offering the chance for scientists to solve this mystery.From Earth, as we see it in visible light, the Sun’s appearance — quiet, unchanging — belies the life and drama of our nearest star. Its turbulent surface is rocked by eruptions and intense bursts of radiation, which hurl solar material at incredible speeds to every corner of the solar system. This solar activity can trigger space weather events that have the potential to disrupt radio communications, harm satellites and astronauts, and at their most severe, interfere with power grids.Above the surface, the corona extends for millions of miles and roils with plasma, gases superheated so much that they separate into an electric flow of ions and free electrons. Eventually, it continues outward as the solar wind, a supersonic stream of plasma permeating the entire solar system. And so, it is that humans live well within the extended atmosphere of our Sun. To fully understand the corona and all its secrets is to understand not only the star that powers life on Earth, but also, the very space around us.Read more on NASA.gov. || ", "hits": 265 }, { "id": 12604, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12604/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2017-06-22T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Scientists Uncover Origins of Dynamic Jets on Sun's Surface", "description": "At any given moment, as many as 10 million wild jets of solar material burst from the sun’s surface. They erupt as fast as 60 miles per second, and can reach lengths of 6,000 miles before collapsing. These are spicules, and despite their grass-like abundance, scientists didn’t understand how they form. Now, for the first time, a computer simulation — so detailed it took a full year to run — shows how spicules form, helping scientists understand how spicules can break free of the sun’s surface and surge upward so quickly. This work relied upon high-cadence observations from NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, and the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope in La Palma. Together, the spacecraft and telescope peer into the lower layers of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the interface region, where spicules form. The results of this NASA-funded study were published in Science on June 22, 2017 — a special time of the year for the IRIS mission, which celebrates its fourth anniversary in space on June 26.Research: On the generation of solar spicules and Alfvénic waves.Journal: Science, June 22, 2017.Link to paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6344/1269.full || ", "hits": 51 }, { "id": 11916, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11916/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2015-07-23T11:45:00-04:00", "title": "Taking A Slice Of Light", "description": "Sometimes studying the sun requires looking at it one strip at a time. || c-1920.jpg (1920x1080) [542.3 KB] || c-1280.jpg (1280x720) [361.9 KB] || c-1024.jpg (1024x576) [269.6 KB] || c-1024_print.jpg (1024x576) [257.0 KB] || c-1024_searchweb.png (320x180) [121.9 KB] || c-1024_thm.png (80x40) [26.6 KB] || ", "hits": 40 }, { "id": 4318, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4318/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-06-26T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "A Slice of Light: How IRIS Observes the Sun", "description": "Short version of the IRIS visualization with windowed SJI imagery. || SDO304IRISspectraWin4.2015MarA_stand.HD1080i.00400_print.jpg (1024x576) [122.9 KB] || SDO304IRISspectraWin4.2015MarA_stand.HD1080i.00400_searchweb.png (320x180) [95.6 KB] || SDO304IRISspectraWin4.2015MarA_stand.HD1080i.00400_thm.png (80x40) [7.6 KB] || SDO304IRISspectraWin4_1080p.mp4 (1920x1080) [22.3 MB] || Windowed.short (1920x1080) [128.0 KB] || SDO304IRISspectraWin4_1080p.webm (1920x1080) [4.3 MB] || ", "hits": 74 }, { "id": 11897, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11897/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2015-06-26T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "A Slice of Light: How IRIS Observes the Sun", "description": "Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.0 || IRISthumb.jpg (720x480) [26.9 KB] || IRISthumb_searchweb.png (320x180) [44.2 KB] || IRISthumb_thm.png (80x40) [15.0 KB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_appletv.m4v (960x540) [32.0 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_youtube_hq.mov (1920x1080) [100.4 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun.mov (1920x1080) [2.0 GB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_1280x720.wmv (1280x720) [32.4 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_prores.mov (1280x720) [1.0 GB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun.webm (1920x1080) [8.5 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_appletv_subtitles.m4v (960x540) [31.9 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_ipod_lg.m4v (640x360) [12.8 MB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun.en_US.vtt [1.3 KB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun.en_US.srt [1.3 KB] || G2015-050_How_IRIS_Sees_Sun_ipod_sm.mp4 (320x240) [6.8 MB] || ", "hits": 75 }, { "id": 11599, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11599/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-08-28T11:30:00-04:00", "title": "Beautiful Explosion", "description": "A giant burst of solar material surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014—and NASA's newest sun-watching mission caught the event in extraordinary detail. This was the first explosion known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) that the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft was able to observe. The spacecraft must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least a day in advance, so catching a CME in the act involves some educated guesses and a little bit of luck. On this day it focused in on the left side of the sun and happened to see the base of the CME. It recorded super-hot material erupting from the sun at speeds of 1.5 million mph. Watch the video to see it for yourself. || ", "hits": 38 }, { "id": 11613, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11613/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-08-01T10:00:00-04:00", "title": "EUNIS Sees Evidence for Nanoflare Heating", "description": "Scientists have recently gathered some of the strongest evidence to date to explain what makes the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface. The new observations show temperatures in the atmosphere so hot that only one current theory explains them: something called nanoflares – a constant peppering of impulsive bursts of heating, none of which can be individually detected — provide the mysterious extra heat. These new observations come from just six minutes worth of data from one of NASA's least expensive type of missions, a sounding rocket. The EUNIS mission, short for Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph, launched on April 23, 2013, gathering a new snapshot of data every 1.3 seconds to track the properties of material over a wide range of temperatures in the complex solar atmosphere. The unique capabilities of EUNIS enabled researchers to obtain these results. The spectrograph was able to clearly and unambiguously distinguish the observations representing the extremely hot material – emission lines showing light with a wavelength of 592.6 angstrom, where an angstrom is the size of an atom — from a very nearby light wavelength of 592.2 angstroms. || ", "hits": 52 }, { "id": 11522, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11522/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-05-07T12:00:00-04:00", "title": "The Best Observed X-class Flare", "description": "On March 29, 2014 the sun released an X-class flare. It was observed by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS; NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO; NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI; the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hinode; and the National Solar Observatory's Dunn Solar Telescope located at Sacramento Peak in New Mexico. To have a record of such an intense flare from so many observatories is unprecedented. Such research can help scientists better understand what catalyst sets off these large explosions on the sun. Perhaps we may even some day be able to predict their onset and forewarn of the radio blackouts solar flares can cause near Earth – blackouts that can interfere with airplane, ship and military communications. || ", "hits": 78 }, { "id": 4164, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4164/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2014-05-07T10:00:00-04:00", "title": "A Multi-Mission View of a Solar Flare: Optical to Gamma-rays", "description": "To improve our understanding of complex phenomena such as solar flares, a wide variety of tools are needed. In the case of astronomy, those tools enable us to analyze the light in many different wavelengths and many different ways.Many different instruments are observing the Sun almost continuously, both from space and on the surface of the Earth. On March 29, 2014, the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico was observing a solar active region and requested other observatories to watch as well. As a result of this coordination, the region was being observed by a large number of different instruments, ground and space-based, when it subsequently erupted with an X-class flare. This visualization presents various combinations of the datasets collected during this effort. The color text represents the dominant color of the dataset in the imagery.Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): HMI (617.1nm). This data represents the Sun is visible light similar to how we see it from the ground.Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): AIA (17.1nm). Solar ultraviolet emission, which can only be seen from space, reveals plasma flowing, and escaping, along magnetic fields.IRIS Slit-Jaw Imager: 140.0nm. This high-resolution imager also contains a slit (the dark vertical line in the center of the field) which directs the light to an ultraviolet spectrometer which is used to extract even more information about the light. The imager slews back-and-forth across the region, providing spectra over a larger area of the Sun.Hinode/X-ray Telescope: x-ray band. Indicates very hot plasma.RHESSI: 50-100 keV. High-energy gamma-ray emission. Emission from these locations represent the very highest energy photons from the flare event.Dunn Solar Telescope: G-band filter. This filter, showing much of the solar surface (photosphere) in visible light, provides a detailed view of the sunspots and convection cells. The view moves because the instrument was repointed several times during the observation.Dunn Solar Telescope: IBIS ( Hydrogen alpha, 656.3nm; Calcium 854.2 nm; Iron 630.15nm). This is the small rectangular view within the Dunn Solar Telescope G-band view. This instrument can tune the wavelength during the observation, which provides views of the solar atmosphere at different depths. || ", "hits": 58 }, { "id": 11467, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11467/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-03-20T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Deconstructing The Sun", "description": "On January 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft saw its strongest solar flare since it launched in 2013. Solar flares are bursts of X-rays and light that stream out into space, but no one yet knows the fine details of what sets them off. By observing a layer of the sun’s lower atmosphere called the chromosphere, which helps regulate how energy and material flows up from the sun's surface, IRIS can see part of the process that powers these events. However, there's a bit of luck involved in making such observations. IRIS’s instruments can’t look at the entire sun at once, so scientists must decide what areas might be the most interesting to watch. On January 28, scientists focused IRIS’s telescope and imaging spectrograph on a magnetically active region on the sun. Perfect timing: They witnessed a medium-sized solar flare in the act of erupting. Watch the video to see the flare through IRIS's eyes. || ", "hits": 23 }, { "id": 4146, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4146/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2014-02-21T10:00:00-05:00", "title": "IRIS close-up of a solar flare", "description": "The Slit-Jaw Imager (SJI) aboard IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) observes a tiny region of the Sun at an image resolution (0.166 arc-seconds per pixel) almost four times higher than the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) (0.6 arc-seconds per pixel). In addition, IRIS has a narrow slit in the imaging plane (the thin, dark vertical line in the center of the inset) which directs some of the light to a spectrograph which allows solar physicists to determine velocity and temperature of the solar plasma.In this zoom-in from a full-disk view of the Sun from SDO, the imager is observering the Sun at a wavelength of 133nm (1330 angstroms). The imager field-of-view is moved across the solar disk in four steps, allowing the slit to pass over different regions of the Sun to determine the properties of the plasma.Note: IRIS and SDO are in very different orbits. You can see samples of the orbits at The 2013 Earth-Orbiting Heliophysics Fleet. IRIS is in a near-Earth orbit, while SDO is much higher at geosynchronous orbit. This difference in camera location creates a small parallax between the images composited from these two cameras. || ", "hits": 31 }, { "id": 11483, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11483/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-02-21T09:45:00-05:00", "title": "NASA's IRIS Spots Its Largest Solar Flare", "description": "On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, witnessed its strongest solar flare since it launched in the summer of 2013. Solar flares are bursts of x-rays and light that stream out into space, but scientists don't yet know the fine details of what sets them off. IRIS peers into a layer of the sun's lower atmosphere just above the surface, called the chromosphere, with unprecedented resolution. However, IRIS can't look at the entire sun at the same time, so the team must always make decisions about what region might provide useful observations. On Jan. 28, scientists spotted a magnetically active region on the sun and focused IRIS on it to see how the solar material behaved under intense magnetic forces. At 2:40 p.m. EST, a moderate flare, labeled an M-class flare — which is the second strongest class flare after X-class – erupted from the area, sending light and x-rays into space. IRIS studies the layer of the sun’s atmosphere called the chromosphere that is key to regulating the flow of energy and material as they travel from the sun's surface out into space. Along the way, the energy heats up the upper atmosphere, the corona, and sometimes powers solar events such as this flare. IRIS is equipped with an instrument called a spectrograph that can separate out the light it sees into its individual wavelengths, which in turn correlates to material at different temperatures, velocities and densities. The spectrograph on IRIS was pointed right into the heart of this flare when it reached its peak, and so the data obtained can help determine how different temperatures of plasma flow where, giving scientists more insight into how flares work. || ", "hits": 32 }, { "id": 11448, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11448/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-02-06T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "Into The Fire", "description": "On June 27, 2013, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, launched into space to study the mysterious lowest layers of the sun’s atmosphere. These layers make up what's called the interface region, an area where solar material is constantly writhing and exploding. The spacecraft is designed to take high-resolution images of the interface region in unprecedented detail. Such images will help scientists see how energy traveling through the region heats the sun's upper atmosphere to temperatures a thousand times hotter than the surface. Initial observations show the region is much more violent than previously understood, and contains a multitude of thin, fibril-like structures that have never before been seen. Watch the video for close-up views of the sun captured by IRIS. || ", "hits": 20 }, { "id": 11256, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11256/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2013-06-19T07:00:00-04:00", "title": "IRIS: Studying the Energy Flow that Powers the Solar Atmosphere", "description": "In late June 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. IRIS will tease out the rules governing the lowest layers of the solar atmosphere — historically some of the hardest to untangle. Known as the solar interface region, this is one of the most complex areas in the sun's atmosphere: all the energy that drives solar activity travels through it. The interface region lies between the sun’s 6,000-degree, white-hot, visible surface, the photosphere, and the much hotter multi-million-degree upper corona. Interactions between the violently moving plasma and the sun’s magnetic field in this area may well be the source of the energy that heats the corona to its million-degree temperatures, some hundreds and occasionally thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface. The chromosphere is also considered a candidate as the origin for giant explosions on the sun such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. IRIS will use high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how solar gases move, gather energy and heat up through the lower solar atmosphere. Outfitted with state-of-the-art tools, IRIS will be able to tease apart what's happening in the solar interface region better than ever before. || ", "hits": 38 } ] }