Keeping Heating It Up, Sun! NASA's IRIS Mission Revealed How Hot Plasma Explodes Like Bombs

By Mary Lourd - 03 Dec '16 21:53PM

The sun is the center star of the solar system. The virtually perfect sphere of hot plasma generates a magnetic field called dynamo process.

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph or also known as IRIS was launched in 2013 for a premiere mission of two years. Its mission has been extended through September 2018. It will continue to study the sun's interface region and its atmosphere.

IRIS tracks how energy and heat coursed of the sun's region. The sun's corona is a plasma which far hotter by a factor from 150 to 450 than the other surface. The average temperature of the sun's corona is one to three million Kelvin. The factors that make it hotter than the other region are the constant outflow of particles and the solar flares. These solar materials that permeate the solar system are called solar wind.

The study has been given evidence what makes the corona much hotter than other regions. It collected data that determined how constant the changes if the fiery surface. The hotter region of the sun generates most of the ultraviolet emission.

In Gottingen, German, Hardi Peter of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research discovered that the solar heat pockets are 200,000 Fahrenheit. These pockets are called solar heat bombs. These pockets release heat energy in such a short time

IRIS studies the speeds of structures in the other part of the solar interface region called the chromosphere. The gas in the chromospheres is often twisting like a twirling tornado around a central magnetic tube. It has revealed a region of the sun more complex than scientists thought.

These emissions and the solar wind writhing movement throughout the solar atmosphere affect the planet Earth weather. Even though, the blue planet is 93 million miles away from the sun. IRIS mission improved scientists understanding of how the enormous deposits of magnetic energy and twisting solar substances the sun's surface which transferred into the million degree temperatures.