A relentless onslaught of tiny explosions buffet the solar atmosphere, researchers report. These eruptions, dubbed nanoflares, might help solve the long-standing riddle about why the sun’s corona is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.
“This is a real breakthrough to solving one of the most important problems in space science,” James Klimchuk, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said at a news conference April 28.
The nanoflares rapidly heat the plasma in the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, to about 10 million degrees Celsius, says Klimchuk. The plasma then quickly cools to a relatively balmy 2 million degrees or so, still much warmer than the roughly 5,500-degree surface of the sun.