LONDON: NASA’s NuSTAR usually examines the mysteries of black holes, supernovae, and other high-energy objects, but it occasionally looks closer to home to study our star.
X-rays light up the surface of our Sun in a bouquet of colors in this new image containing data from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). The high-energy X-rays seen by NuSTAR are shown in blue, while green represents lower-energy X-rays from the X-ray Telescope instrument on the Hinode spacecraft, named after the Japanese word for sunrise. The yellow and green colors show ultraviolet light from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
NuSTAR usually spends its time examining the mysteries of black holes, supernovae, and other high-energy objects in space, but it can also look closer to home to study our Sun.
“We can see a few active regions on the Sun in this view,” said Hannah. “Our Sun is quieting down in its activity cycle, but still has a couple of years before it reaches a minimum.”
Those active areas of the Sun are filled with flares, which are giant eruptions on the surface of the Sun that spew out charged particles and high-energy radiation. They occur when magnetic field lines become tangled and broken, and then reconnect. Due to its extreme sensitivity, NuSTAR’s telescope cannot view the larger flares, but it can help measure the energy of smaller microflares, which produce only one-millionth the energy of the larger flares.
