NASA IRIS: Providing unprecedented images of Sun

The fine detail in images of prominences in the sun's atmosphere from NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) -- such as the red swirls shown here -- are challenging the way scientists understand such events. 

Credit: NASA/LMSAL /IRIS

The region located between the surface of the sun and its atmosphere has been revealed as a more violent place than previously understood, according to images and data from NASA's newest solar observatory, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, (IRIS).

Solar observatories look at the sun in layers. By capturing light emitted by atoms of different temperatures, they can focus in on different heights above the sun's surface extending well out into the solar atmosphere, the corona.

On June 27, 2013, IRIS, was launched, to study what's known as the interface region – a layer between the sun's surface and corona that previously was not well observed.

Over its first six moths, IRIS has thrilled scientists with detailed images of the interface region, finding even more turbulence and complexity than expected.

IRIS scientists presented the mission's early observations at a press conference at the Fall American Geophysical Union meeting on Dec. 9, 2013.

Alan Title

"The quality of images and spectra we are receiving from IRIS is amazing," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, Calif. "And we're getting this kind of quality from a smaller, less expensive mission, which took only 44 months to build."

For the first time, IRIS is making it possible to study the explosive phenomena in the interface region in sufficient detail to determine their role in heating the outer solar atmosphere.

The mission's observations also open a new window into the dynamics of the low solar atmosphere that play a pivotal role in accelerating the solar wind and driving solar eruptive events.

Tracking the complex processes in the interface region requires instrument and modeling capabilities that are only now within our technological reach.

IRIS captures both images and what's known as spectra, which display how much of any given wavelength of light is present.

This, in turn, corresponds to how much material in the solar atmosphere is present at specific velocities, temperatures and densities.

IRIS's success is due not only to its high spatial and temporal resolution, but also because of parallel development of advanced computer models.

The combined images and spectra have provided new imagery of a region that was always known to be dynamic, but shows it to be even more violent and turbulent than imagined.

This is an artist's concept of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, satellite in orbit. Credit: NASA

"We are seeing rich and unprecedented images of violent events in which gases are accelerated to very high velocities while being rapidly heated to hundreds of thousands of degrees," said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin.

"These types of observations present significant challenges to current theoretical models."



This video compares the Solar Dynamics Observatory's (SDO) resolution with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) resolution for the same region of the Sun