Our Sun is not uniformly hot

Recent observations have evidenced "hotter" zones in our Sun's atmosphere. There, temperature can be as high as a million Kelvin, rather than 10,000 K, as would be normal on the average of the Sun's chromosphere. Such fluctuations are attributed to the local release  of energy, due to magnetic reconnection. Researches on the temperature distribution in the Sun's external atmosphere have originated with the launch of the IRIS satellite, which looks at the Sun through an ultraviolet "eye". Previous results have reported temperature fluctuations, but never that high.

The research will be published in The Astrophysical Journal, and is the result of a collaboration between UniCT and NASA, including Salvo Guglielmino and Francesca Zuccarello at #DFA, and other colleagues associated to INAF. The Department has been funded for research concerning high within the University's Linea di Intervento 1, and will be the starting point of future research for the European Solar Telescope (EST), where UniCT is strongly involved. (January 1st, 2019 is the starting date of the H2020 Solarnet project.)