Meanwhile, researchers will fan out across the ground for additional studies - such as Habbal’s long-running work to make temperature maps of the solar corona. Along with taking infrared measurements, they will create the first-ever thermal map of the planet Mercury and hunt for vulcanoids - small asteroids that might lie between Mercury and the Sun. The jets will fly one after the other, and together will collect data from more than seven minutes of totality. “Ideally, we’re going to discover some mechanism that carries enough energy into the corona to heat the corona,” says Amir Caspi, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder who is leading the effort. They will carry high-speed video cameras to capture the movement of the corona’s wispy filaments. Similarly, NASA is sending two jets, once used to monitor space-shuttle launches, to chase totality. Testing equipment such as the infrared spectrometer on the plane will allow scientists to develop next-generation technologies that could be flown into space to gather data cheaply and quickly for a range of scientific applications, says Scott McIntosh, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado. Pilots will fly the plane to a height of about 15 kilometres, to escape any clouds, and will catch about 4 minutes of totality on its path through Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The distance between certain lines in the spectrum reveals the strength of the magnetic field in that location - information that can’t be measured directly otherwise. The infrared instrument aboard the plane will gather detailed spectral information at several locations around the solar corona. “We’ve been missing this piece of the puzzle,” says Chad Madsen, a postdoctoral fellow with the project at the CfA. Infrared studies reveal more about the corona’s magnetic fields, where energy is unleashed in powerful currents from the Sun’s surface up into the atmosphere. But now, infrared detectors have become sensitive enough to begin opening a new window on the corona, says Jenna Samra, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who helps to lead the project. In the past, researchers have focused on studying the corona at ultraviolet wavelengths from space, and at visible wavelengths from the ground. 1, 0190 2017).ĭuring the coming eclipse, one major effort will use a US National Science Foundation Gulfstream V plane to probe magnetic flows in the solar corona at infrared wavelengths, which can be difficult to measure from the ground (see ‘Day of darkness’). Over the centuries, astronomers have used eclipses to make fundamental advances, such as discovering helium and confirming Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity ( J. The Moon blocks the Sun perfectly during a total solar eclipse, enabling better views of the corona than when using a coronagraph. But corona-graphs, which are installed on satellites and ground-based telescopes, are not ideal to protect other instruments from potential damage caused by stray sunlight, they obscure an area slightly larger than the solar disk, blotting out a bit of the corona. Solar researchers typically use instruments called corona-graphs that physically block the Sun’s disk and reveal the surrounding corona. There is no upper limit to the Corona.Total solar eclipses, which occur about once every 18 months, provide the best chance to study the Sun’s corona - the ethereal wisps of superheated plasma that are usually obscured by glare from the solar surface (see ‘ Citizen science’). We are able to see it during a solar eclipse, or by using a special device called the coronagraph. It is impossible to see the Corona with the naked eye, but there is an exception. It starts at about 1300 miles above the photosphere, and its temperature is measured to be around 900,000 degrees Fahrenheit. There are four outer layers of the Sun, and the Corona is the outermost one. The outer layers are the Corona, the Transition Region, the Chromosphere, and the Photosphere, while the inner layers are the Core, the Radiative Zone, and the Convection Zone.

The layers of the Sun are divided into two larger groups, the outer and the inner layers. However, we can determine the internal structure of the Sun, and it is made up of seven different layers.

Because the Sun is mostly composed of helium and hydrogen and is not solid, it does not have an outer boundary that is clearly defined. The critical difference is that the Sun is not solid, unlike Earth, so the layers are a bit harder to determine. Just like our planet, and most other celestial bodies, the Sun is divided into distinct layers.

Sun corona helium