NASA's NuSTAR Telescope discovers mysterious light shows on the sun

With the help of images from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) discovering mysterious light shows on the sun, scientists may be able to explain why the sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, can reach more than a million degrees and is at least 100 times hotter than its surface.

Scientists have been perplexed by this because the sun’s radiation comes outward from its center. It is comparable to a fire where the air is 100 times hotter than the flames.

Human eyes cannot see all of the light that the sun emits, not even on a sunny day. The high-energy X-rays released by the hottest materials in the Sun’s atmosphere, as well as other forms of this hidden light, are visible in the NuSTAR images.

NASA speculates that nanoflares, tiny eruptions in the sun’s atmosphere, might be the cause of the corona’s heat as large bursts of heat, light, and particles called flares can be seen by a variety of solar observatories.

Even though nanoflares are substantially smaller events, both types of flares emit material that is even hotter than the corona’s mean temperature, explained the space administration.

Nanoflares may occur considerably more frequently than regular flares, possibly frequently enough to heat the corona as a whole.

Regular flares don’t occur frequently enough to maintain the corona at the high temperatures astronomers observe, it clarified on its official website.

The NASA Parker Solar Probe, which is traveling beyond all other spacecraft in history, was making its 12th close approach to the Sun, or perihelion, at the time of the observations featured in the most current photographs capturing the light show.

When scientists use NuSTAR to make observations during one of Parker’s perihelion crossings, they can link activity in the Sun’s atmosphere that is seen from a distance with