Despite decades of high-quality observations, many details about our sun are still unknown.
The fact that the sun is hot should not be news to a single person. The sun’s surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems toasty enough. But surrounding the sun is an atmosphere of sorts called the. This envelope of superheated gas — plasma, actually — measures more than 3 million degrees. And scientists are still trying to figure out how this outer layer is so much hotter than what lies beneath it.
In 1869, astronomers took advantage of just such an eclipse to spy on the sun’s suddenly visible outermost layer. They even pointed a spectrometer at the gauzy light in order to fingerprint the elusive material. They spotted an unfamiliar green line that appeared to be a totally new element: coronium. Seventy years later, scientists realized it was actually the familiar element iron, heated to never-before-seen millions of degrees.
The sun emits powerful solar flares, captured here in a composite image from a year’s worth of observations. Part of the problem is that we don’t understand a lot of the small-scale happenings on the sun. We know it does its job of heating our planet, and we know generally how. But the scale of the materials and forces at work simply don’t exist in a more accessible laboratory, and getting close enough to the sun to study it in detail is difficult, to say the least.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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