Surf's Up! Solar Wave's Path Tracked Through Sun's Atmosphere

For the first time, a certain type of solar wave was caught surfing from the sun's surface up through the star's atmosphere, lending insight into how the sun's material moves and mixes. The new imagery will help scientists better understand how the sun's lower atmosphere works, NASA officials said, and could help researchers solve a long-standing mystery about the sun: the coronal heating problem. "We see certain kinds of solar seismic waves channeling upwards into the lower atmosphere, called the chromosphere, and from there, into the corona," Junwei Zhao, a solar scientist at Stanford University in California who led the study, said in a statement.

Read More http://ift.tt/2eqX79Z