Current Issue
Japanese Table of ContentsVolume 486 Number 7404 pp439-564
28 June 2012
This Week
News In Focus
About the cover
The Sun’s outer atmosphere is much hotter than the surface, reaching more than a million kelvin, but how sufficient energy is transferred and dissipated has remained a puzzle. Recent advances in high-resolution imaging of small-scale structures on the solar surface (from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope) revealed swirling events in the Sun’s chromosphere, the atmospheric layer sandwiched between the corona and the photosphere. This paper reports observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft that reveal rapidly rotating magnetic structures in the transition region and low corona that are associated with these chromospheric swirls. These structures, resembling super-tornadoes under solar conditions, reach from the convection zone into the upper solar atmosphere and provide an alternative mechanism for channelling energy from the lower to the upper solar atmosphere a possible explanation for the heating of the outer solar atmosphere that results in the observed temperatures. The cover shows a visualization (using VAPOR software) of a computer simulation (using CO5BOLD) of a swirling magnetic ‘tornado connecting the observed surface of the Sun with the outer atmosphere.
