NASA Sounding Rocket Instrument Spots Signatures of Long-Sought Small Solar Flares (IMAGE)

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Sounding Rocket Instrument Spots Signatures of Long-Sought Small Solar Flares

Caption

The NASA-funded FOXSI instrument captured new evidence of small solar flares, called nanoflares, during its December 2014 flight on a suborbital sounding rocket. Nanoflares could help explain why the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, is so much hotter than the surface. Here, FOXSI's observations of hard X-rays are shown in blue, superimposed over a soft X-ray image of the Sun from JAXA and NASA's Hinode solar-observing satellite.

Credit

Credits: JAXA/NASA/Hinode/FOXSI

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