The region located between the surface of the sun and its atmosphere
has been revealed as a more violent place than previously understood,
according to images and data from NASA's newest solar observatory, the
Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS.
Solar observatories look at the sun in layers. By capturing light
emitted by atoms of different temperatures, they can focus in on
different heights above the sun's surface extending well out into the
solar atmosphere, the corona. On June 27, 2013, IRIS, was launched, to
study what's known as the interface region – a layer between the sun's
surface and corona that previously was not well observed.
Over its first six months, IRIS has thrilled scientists with detailed
images of the interface region, finding even more turbulence and
complexity than expected. IRIS scientists presented the mission's early
observations at a press conference at the Fall American Geophysical
Union meeting on Dec. 9, 2013.
"The quality of images and spectra we are receiving from IRIS is
amazing," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at Lockheed
Martin in Palo Alto, Calif. "And we're getting this kind of quality from
a smaller, less expensive mission, which took only 44 months to build."
For the first time, IRIS is making it possible to study the explosive
phenomena in the interface region in sufficient detail to determine
their role in heating the outer solar atmosphere. The mission’s
observations also open a new window into the dynamics of the low solar
atmosphere that play a pivotal role in accelerating the solar wind and
driving solar eruptive events.
Tracking the complex processes in the interface region requires
instrument and modeling capabilities that are only now within our
technological reach. IRIS captures both images and what's known as
spectra, which display how much of any given wavelength of light is
present. This, in turn, corresponds to how much material in the solar
atmosphere is present at specific velocities, temperatures and
densities. IRIS's success is due not only to its high spatial and
temporal resolution, but also because of parallel development of
advanced computer models. The combined images and spectra have provided
new imagery of a region that was always known to be dynamic, but shows
it to be even more violent and turbulent than imagined.
"We are seeing rich and unprecedented images of violent events in
which gases are accelerated to very high velocities while being rapidly
heated to hundreds of thousands of degrees," said Bart De Pontieu, the
IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin. "These types of observations
present significant challenges to current theoretical models."
DePontieu has been culling images of two particular types of events
on the sun that have long been interesting to scientists. One is known
as a prominence, which are cool regions within the interface region that
appear as giant loops of solar material rising up above the solar
surface. When these prominences erupt they lead to solar storms that can
reach Earth. IRIS shows highly dynamic and finely structured flows
sweeping throughout the prominence.
The second type of event is called a spicule, which are giant
fountains of gas – as wide as a state and as long as Earth – that zoom
up from the sun's surface at 150,000 miles per hour. Spicules may play a
role in distributing heat and energy up into the sun's atmosphere, the
corona. IRIS imaging and spectral data allows us to see at high
resolution, for the first time, how the spicules evolve. In both cases,
observations are more complex than what existing theoretical models
predicted.
"We see discrepancies between these observations and the models and
that is great news for advancing knowledge," said Mats Carlsson, an
astrophysicist at the University of Oslo in Norway. "By seeing something
we don't understand we have a chance of learning something new."
Carlsson helps support the crucial computer model component of IRIS'
observations. The computer models require an intense amount of power.
Modeling just an hour of events on the sun can take several months of
computer time. IRIS relies on supercomputers at NASA's Ames Research
Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the Norwegian supercomputer
collaboration and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe.
Such computer models had helped design the IRIS instruments by
providing a basis for the instrument performance requirements.
Currently, they are used for analysis of IRIS data, as they represent
the state of knowledge about what scientists understand about the
interface region. By comparing models with actual observations,
researchers figure out where the models fail, and therefore where the
current state of knowledge is not complete.
By filling in these gaps, IRIS observations are helping round out our
images of the solar atmosphere. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency/NASA Hinode mission provides detailed imagery of the solar
surface. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory offers imagery of what's
higher up in the corona. Now, IRIS provides unprecedented information
about the crucial layer in between, to finally help us understand how
energy moves through the lower levels of the solar atmosphere driving
the solar wind and heating the corona.
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