New NASA Camera Reveals Sun's Highways and Sparkles in Solar Corona (Video)

The sun's activity is ramping up as it reaches the peak of its 11-year solar cycle. Now, NASA's new rocket-launched camera has revealed stunning and unprecedented images of our nearest star's outer atmosphere. The new pictures reveal fast track "highways" and "sparkles" that may help answer some long-standing questions about the solar corona.

The new camera, known as the NASA High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C), was launched into space, obtaining images of the solar corona five times sharper than anything seen before. It observed the sun in extreme ultraviolet light, focusing on a large, magnetically-active sunspot. It was also able to acquire data at a rate of about one image every five seconds.

So what do the images show? Small clumps of electrified gas, known as plasma, race along highways shaped by the sun's magnetic field. This plasma soars at temperatures of up to one million degrees Celsius as it shoots across the sun at about 235 times the speed of sound on Earth. These flows of material are inside a so-called solar filament, a region of dense plasma that can erupt outward from the sun in a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection (CME).

CMEs are eruptions of plasma that can carry billions of tons of particles into space. If it ejects in the right direction, it can sling these particles toward Earth which then disturb the terrestrial magnetic field. This, in turn, can cause radio blackouts and other issues such as damaging satellite electronics. It's crucial to better understand this "space weather" in order to better predict and prepare for CMEs--and the new images may do just that. They offer new insight into the driving force behind these eruptions.

That's not all the images reveal, though. They also show bright "dots" which switch on and off at high speed. The sparkles, which last about 25 seconds, are over 400 miles across and release 1024 (one million million million million) Joules of energy with each appearance. In fact, they show that enormous amounts of energy are being added into the corona and may then be released violently to heat the plasma. This may explain why the corona is so much hotter than the solar surface.

The findings could pave the way to better understanding the solar corona and the sun itself. This, in turn, could better help researchers predict space weather, which could lead to safer space exploration and better preparations on Earth.

The findings are published in Solar and Stellar Astrophysics.

Want to see the solar sparkles? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.