Believe nothing

ScienceDaily (July 20, 2012) — Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun’s corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light. The 16-megapixel images were captured by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, which was launched on a sounding rocket on July 11th. The Hi-C telescope provides five times more detail than the next-best observations by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

These photos of the solar corona, or million-degree outer atmosphere, show the improvement in resolution offered by NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C (bottom), versus the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (top). Both images show a portion of the sun’s surface roughly 85,000 by 50,000 miles in size. Hi-C launched on a sounding rocket on July 11, 2012 in a flight that lasted about 10 minutes. The representative-color images were made from observations of ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 19.3 nanometers (25 times shorter than the wavelength of visible light). (Credit: NASA)

“Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” said Smithsonian astronomer Leon Golub (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), one of the lead investigators on the mission.

Understanding the Sun’s activity and its effects on Earth’s environment was the critical scientific objective of Hi-C, which provided unprecedented views of the dynamic activity and structure in the solar atmosphere.

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120720195519.htm