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NASA's new IRIS telescope keeps a close watch on small
areas of the Sun at a time. On January 28th,
2014. IRIS caught a huge burst of X-ray light.
a solar flare. This is the largest flare IRIS has seen so far.
IRIS peers into a dynamic region of the Sun called the chromosphere,
better than has ever been done before. The moving vertical
line on the images is part of an instrument that allows scientists to look
at specific temperatures of solar material at a time. That kind of individualized
temperature data is called spectra, and scientists can use it to map how the
material in the flare is moving around in unprecedented detail.
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