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As you get farther away from the sun, the temperature goes up.
Now, this is counterintuitive. It's like if you are trying to heat a marshmallow on
a fire, you put the marshmallow closer to the fire to heat it up
not pull it farther away. This been a mystery for
quite a while. According to the nanoflare heating theory of
the solar corona, there are very many low
energy nanoflare heating events. Energy is released
in a nanoflare, it heats the local plasma to
a very high temperature, around 10 million degrees
and there's such a small amount of this very hot plasma,
that we can't see the individual nanoflares, but
as you cool down through the 2 million degree range,
which happens fairly quickly, and as many of these events occur,
we end up seeing the 2 million degree solar corona.
that we're used to. One of the objectives of the EUNIS flight
was to address this.
EUNIS is an acronym for the Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incident Spectragraph
It's an instrument that we fly on a sounding rocket
out of White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
It reaches an altitude of about 320 kilometers
which is about 200 miles. We record about
6 minutes of observations of the sun. and then the instrument
parachutes back down into the desert where we can retrieve it.
Basically, it's 2 separate instruments, 2 spectrameters,
pointed in the same area of the sun,
so we can be observing a very wide wavelength range. Each
of these channels is very rich in emission lines.
There are lines from many different ionization stages of lots
of different elements. For the purposes of this work, we are interested
in the Fe XIX and the Fe XII emission.
We can see faint emission at those temperatures that provide
the further smoking gun evidence for the nanoflare heating
theory. So, this is very exciting for astronomers
and people who are trying to diagnose what is going on in the sun's atmosphere
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