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As you get farther away from the sun, the temperature goes up.

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Now, this is counterintuitive. It's like if you are trying to heat a marshmallow on

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a fire, you put the marshmallow closer to the fire to heat it up

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not pull it farther away. This been a mystery for

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quite a while. According to the nanoflare heating theory of

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the solar corona, there are very many low

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energy nanoflare heating events. Energy is released

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in a nanoflare, it heats the local plasma to

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a very high temperature, around 10 million degrees

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and there's such a small amount of this very hot plasma,

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that we can't see the individual nanoflares, but

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as you cool down through the 2 million degree range,

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which happens fairly quickly, and as many of these events occur,

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we end up seeing the 2 million degree solar corona.

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that we're used to. One of the objectives of the EUNIS flight

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was to address this.

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EUNIS is an acronym for the Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incident Spectragraph

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It's an instrument that we fly on a sounding rocket

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out of White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

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It reaches an altitude of about 320 kilometers

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which is about 200 miles. We record about

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6 minutes of observations of the sun. and then the instrument

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parachutes back down into the desert where we can retrieve it.

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Basically, it's 2 separate instruments, 2 spectrameters,

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pointed in the same area of the sun,

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so we can be observing a very wide wavelength range. Each

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of these channels is very rich in emission lines.

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There are lines from many different ionization stages of lots

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of different elements. For the purposes of this work, we are interested

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in the Fe XIX and the Fe XII emission.

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We can see faint emission at those temperatures that provide

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the further smoking gun evidence for the nanoflare heating

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theory. So, this is very exciting for astronomers

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and people who are trying to diagnose what is going on in the sun's atmosphere

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beeping