For decades after its discovery, observers could only see the solar chromosphere for a few fleeting moments: during a total solar eclipse, when a bright red glow ringed the Moon’s silhouette.
For decades after its discovery, observers could only see the solar chromosphere for a few fleeting moments: during a total solar eclipse, when a bright red glow ringed the Moon’s silhouette.
More than a hundred years later, the chromosphere remains the most mysterious of the Sun’s atmospheric layers. Sandwiched between the bright surface and the ethereal solar corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the chromosphere is a place of rapid change, where temperature rises and magnetic fields begin to dominate the Sun’s behavior.
Now, for the first time, a triad of NASA missions have peered into the chromosphere to return multi-height measurements of its magnetic field. The observations – captured by two satellites and the Chromospheric Layer Spectropolarimeter 2, or CLASP2 mission, aboard a small suborbital rocket – help reveal how magnetic fields on the Sun’s surface give rise to the brilliant eruptions in its outer atmosphere. The paper was published today in Science Advances
Read more at: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
