NASA research has revealed how electric currents and mixed magnetic fields heat mossy regions of the sun by between 10,000 and 1 million degrees Fahrenheit, helping to understand the heating of the sun’s atmosphere.

Did you know that there is algae in the sun? Scientists named the small, bright and fragmented structure of the plasma in the sun’s atmosphere “algae” because it resembles plants on land. First discovered by NASA’s TRACE mission in 1999, this algae blooms around the center of the solar system, where magnetic conditions are strong. It occupies two layers of the atmosphere known as the chromosphere and corona, and is hidden beneath long hairy strings of plasma known as coronal loops.

sun algae research

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how this mossy region is connected to the lower layers of the Sun’s atmosphere and how the material there heated up from 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly 1 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 times hotter than the bright surface just below). Now, studies by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) sounding rocket and NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission have given scientists insight into the mechanism of overheating in the moss.

Advances in understanding solar heating

Observations using these instruments, combined with advanced three-dimensional modeling, showed that electrical currents could help heat the moss. There are a bunch of magnetic field lines all over this area, like invisible spaghetti. This magnetic spaghetti ball creates electrical currents that can help heat the material to a wide temperature range from 10,000 to 1 million degrees Fahrenheit. This local heating of the moss appears to occur in addition to heat from the hot corona covering it by several million degrees. This opinion was published in the magazine Nature Astronomy April 15 could help scientists understand the broader question of why the Sun’s corona is so hotter than the surface.

Future research and tasks

“Thanks to high-resolution observations and our advanced numerical modeling, we are able to unravel part of this mystery that has baffled us for the past quarter-century,” said lead author Suvik Bowes, a scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. Bay Area Environmental Institute, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. “But this is only part of the puzzle; It doesn’t solve the whole problem.”

This requires much more observation. Some are coming soon: Hi-C is scheduled to launch again this month to capture a solar flare, and it could also capture another field of algae with IRIS. But to obtain observational data that could pinpoint how the corona and algae are heating, scientists and engineers are working to develop new tools on the upcoming Multislit Solar Explorer (MUSE) mission.