Newly discovered fast magnetic waves might explain why the sun's corona is so hot.
Scientists have previously detected slower magnetic waves, but those didn't seem to produce enough energy to explain the enormous temperature difference between the sun's surface and the outer atmosphere.
"Over the past 80 years, astrophysicists have tried to solve this problem and now more and more evidence is emerging that the corona can be heated by magnetic waves," Tom Van Doorsselaere, a professor of plasma physics at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and one of the authors of the new study, saidThe newly discovered structures can be seen in a video sequence captured by the EUI instrument in October last year.
Solar Orbiter, launched in February 2020, takes the closest images of the star at the center of our solar system. Although Earth-based telescopes can provide images of the sun in a higher resolution, these telescopes can't study the extreme ultraviolet part of the solar light spectrum. Because these frequencies are filtered out by, ground-based telescopes therefore don't see many of the key phenomena driving the sun's behavior.
Solar Orbiter, which makes regular approaches to less than 48 million miles from the sun , doesn't have those issues. In its alone, released in June 2020, Solar Orbiter found other indications of processes that might play a role in the coronal heating mystery.
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