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Science definition of photosphere12/4/2023 ![]() ![]() While uncommon on Earth, 99% of the matter we can see in the universe is made of plasma. Plasmas are so incredibly hot, that the electrons leave their atoms, making it essentially a gas of charged particles. Plasma is a state of matter much like solid, liquid and gas. The material in the sun and its atmosphere - as well as the material in the aurora and fluorescent lights - are all plasmas. The photosphere is the surface layer of the sun that we can see in the visible light range. Solar particles speed outward from the sun, pushing back the material in the rest of space, known as the interstellar medium. It is created by the outflow of particles from the sun called the solar wind, which streams far past the outermost planets, six to nine billion miles away from the sun. The heliosphere is a bubble that surrounds our entire solar system as it travels through space. Just after blowing into space, a CME cloud can grow as wide as 30 million miles across, 35 times the diameter of the sun.Īrtist's concept of our Heliosphere as it travels through our the Milky Way galaxy. At their largest, CMEs can contain 10 billion tons of matter, and they can move at speeds of up to 4 million miles an hour. CMEs do often occur at the same time as a flare, and scientists currently study how the two phenomena are connected. Not to be confused with the intense burst of light that is a solar flare, a CME is a cloud of magnetized solar material that erupts from the sun's atmosphere, the corona, into interplanetary space. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections originate in the corona. While the sun's surface is 6000K, the corona can reach up to millions of degrees, sparking questions from researchers on what mechanisms heat the atmosphere so dramatically. ![]() It is filled with plasma, whose movements are governed by the tangle of magnetic fields surrounding the sun. This region is notoriously tricky to study because one can't easily track the way light moves through it. This base layer of the sun's atmosphere requires more energy to heat than the million degree corona itself and provides all the material to the corona and heliosphere. The temperature in the chromosphere rises from 6000 K to about 20,000 K, making it hotter than the photosphere but not as hot as the higher atmosphere, the corona. The relatively thin region – five to ten thousand miles tall - of the solar atmosphere located above the sun's surface. ![]() IRIS will study the Chromosphere and Transition Region of the sun. ![]()
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