NASA probe allows for visualization of solar storms
You’re looking at a computer simulation of a solar cyclone, constructed using data from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory and a Swedish-based solar telescope. The cyclone is composed of plasma swirling among the solar magnetic fields.
These solar cyclones may help to answer a question that scientists had long wondered about: why is the sun’s atmosphere more than 300 times hotter than its surface? Scientists previously thought that the heat came from the surface of the sun, but how it traveled to the surface was unclear. Now, researchers think that these solar storms, as many as 11,000 at once, funnel heat from the sun’s surface to the corona, as they reported in Nature.
