NASA To Explore "Secret Layer" of the Sun 75
SpaceAdmiral brings news that NASA will be launching a telescope next April, called Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI), which will examine what is called the "transition region" between the Sun's corona and the chromosphere. Scientists have studied characteristics of the Sun around this region before, but never within it. NASA notes:
"It is a place in the sun's atmosphere, about 5000 km above the stellar surface, where magnetic fields overwhelm the pressure of matter and seize control of the sun's gases. It's where solar flares explode, where coronal mass ejections begin their journey to Earth, where the solar wind is mysteriously accelerated to a million mph. It is, in short, the birthplace of space weather."
Cool screen backgrounds (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if they will be able to get some more high resolution images like:
High resolution image of Solar Granulation [solarphysics.kva.se]
And some animations: Sun spot #1 [solarphysics.kva.se] Sun spot #2 [astro.uio.no]
Reminds me of an interesting site (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of an interesting site (Score:1, Interesting)
This is one of the more fascinating astronomy sites I've seen, mainly because they don't seem to start with a bias of "what we know can't be so".
They don't just not start there, they don't go there at all. This, of course, is what enables it to be so fascinating:
Seriously, they're saying that a select few pieces of publicaly available data prove clearly and obviously that everyone else is completely wrong, while their own "clear and obvious" explanations are completely nonsensical (for example, neon being used as a cryogenic refrigerant has nothing to do with how a solid crust on the sun can supposedly form under it).