Scientists have recently gathered some of the strongest evidence to date to explain what makes the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface. The new observations of the small-scale extremely hot temperatures are consistent with only one current theory: something called nanoflares -- a constant peppering of impulsive¹ bursts of heating, none of which can be individually detected -- provide the mysterious extra heat. What's even more surprising is these new observations come from just six minutes worth of data from one of NASA's least expensive type of missions, a sounding rocket（探测火箭）. The EUNIS mission, short for Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph, launched on April 23, 2013, gathering² a new snapshot of data every 1.3 seconds to track the properties of material over a wide range of temperatures in the complex solar atmosphere.

 

The sun's visible surface, called the photosphere³（光球层）, is some 6,000 Kelvins, while the corona⁴ regularly reaches temperatures which are 300 times as hot.

 

"That's a bit of a puzzle," said Jeff Brosius, a space scientist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Things usually get cooler farther away from a hot source. When you're roasting a marshmallow you move it closer to the fire to cook it, not farther away."

 

Brosius is the first author of a paper on these results appearing in the Aug. 1, 2014, edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

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