New clues are helping solve a long held belief that the Sun’s surface is millions of degrees hotter than its atmosphere. Astronomers and scientists used two different satellites to come to a conclusion that spicules are created on the surface which vent hot gases called plasma towards the Suns atmosphere.
Earlier scientists used to think that spicules are too cool to be the source of high temperature plasma that generates the sun’s ultravoilet light. Scientists recently discovered a new short lived spicule called Type II spicules that shootup at 150 kilometers per second and then disappear.
Scientists were able to discover this by combining data from the new Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory with the data from NASA’s Focal Plane Package for the Solar Optical Telescope on the Japanese Hinode satellite. These combined observations gave the researchers enough resolution to make a one-to-one connection between the heated plasma and spicules jetting out into the corona.
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