Never-Before-Seen Structures Have Been Detected in Our Sun's Corona

[Judi Lynn]

Ooooooh.

MICHELLE STARR 19 JUL 2018

Using longer exposures and sophisticated processing techniques, scientists have taken extraordinarily high-fidelity pictures of the Sun's outer atmosphere - what we call the corona - and discovered fine details that have never been detected before.

The Sun is a complex object, and with the soon-to-be-launched Parker Solar Probe we're on the verge of learning so much more about it. But there's still a lot we can do with our current technology, as scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have just demonstrated.

The team used the COR-2 coronagraph instrument on NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO-A) to study details in the Sun's outer atmosphere.

This instrument takes images of the atmosphere by using what is known as an occulting disc - a disc placed in front of the lens that blocks out the actual Sun from the image, and therefore the light that would overwhelm the fine details in the plasma of the Sun's atmosphere.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/never-before-seen-structures-suns-corona-signal-to-noise-algorithm-parker

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. And less than 10 minutes later...

the suns rays hit Earth through space.