“As we become more of a space-based culture, understanding the sun and how it interacts with the Earth is even more important.” “We’re very connected to these problems, even though it’s not necessarily something that’s going to change your life today,” says Amy Winebarger, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Physical World Pluto’s layered sky: Hazy with a chance of haze The largest flares from the corona can wreak havoc with power grids, wireless communication and satellites. That energy often affects Earth, with occasionally disastrous results. And perhaps most baffling of all, the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the sun’s surface.įiguring out how this excess energy gets into the corona isn’t just an academic exercise. Some particles shoot out of the corona with so much energy that they approach the speed of light. The solar wind doesn’t slow down as it leaves the sun - it speeds up. Events in the corona affect all of the sun’s worlds, including Earth and the technological society that humans have built upon it.Īnd yet, despite roughly 80 years of study, much about the corona remains a mystery. Composed mostly of electrons and the bare nuclei of hydrogen and helium atoms, it is the launchpad for the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that escape the corona and wash over the planets, eventually petering out at the threshold to interstellar space. That glow is the solar corona, the sun’s tenuous upper atmosphere of ionized gas. Daytime morphs into a 360-degree dusk, and where the sun once hung a black hole punches through the sky, wreathed by a white ethereal glow.
Spectrum of the First Low-Temperature Brown Dwarf.The spectrum of debris disk sample HD165014.Iodine molecules, G-type giant star spectra, and the search for extrasolar planets.Analysis of Spectra in Astrophysics - Visiting the Old, Learning of the New.Adaptive Optics, Powerful in Spectroscopic Observations, as Well.Echelle Spectrographs: instruments covering a Wide Wavelength Range with High Spectral Resolution.Bargain Observations “Multi Object Slits Spectroscopy”.Previous : Measurement of Solar Magnetic Field.Yukio Katsukawa Data Date OctoObject the Sun Instrument Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on Hinode Wavelength Extreme-ultraviolet Analysis of the emission lines of the ionized iron yields information on the temperature of the corona. In such a hot corona, a part of the electrons is removed from iron atoms, and more electrons are removed at higher temperature. Iron, with the symbol Fe, is atomic number 26 and will have 26 electrons. The most frequent lines are emission lines originating in ionized iron. We can find many spectral lines radiating from high temperature (higher than one million Kelvin) plasma. The extreme-ultraviolet is a wavelength range of the shorter wavelength region of ultraviolet radiation. The observational satellite Hinode's onboard instrument, called Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS), was designed for obtaining spectra of the solar corona.
That is the reason why we need a space observatory. However, ultraviolet and X-ray radiation cannot penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. The high-temperature corona emits more radiation at shorter wavelength. Observations at shorter wavelength light such as ultraviolet and X-ray are appropriate to investigate the corona in detail. In visible light, the bright solar surface hampers observation of the faint corona. To observe the corona surrounding the Sun, we have to wait for an opportunity to view a total solar eclipse when the Moon fully blocks the solar disk.