SOLAR SPOTTER: NASA’s IRIS in the clean room, preparing for launch.Image: LMSAL

Above the surface of the sun, plasma roiling in the star’s atmosphere does something that so far defies explanation, and seems to defy physics: It gets hotter as it moves farther out.

In the corona, the expansive outer layer of the solar atmosphere that extends millions of kilometers from the sun’s surface, temperatures reach millions of kelvins. The surface, by contrast, is a tepid 6,000 K (around 5,700 degrees Celsius). Although astronomers have developed a few possible explanations in recent years, no one can say precisely how or why the corona gets so hot. A new satellite will scrutinize the underlying regions of the sun’s atmosphere, giving physicists a chance to dig down like botanists studying a plant’s roots and uncover information that may help them solve the mystery.

The satellite—NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), a new ultraviolet space telescope—will examine the chromosphere, a long-ignored layer of plasma beneath the corona, in unprecedented detail. “I wonder if maybe we were staring too hard at the corona to understand the corona,” says IRIS scientist Charles Kankelborg, a physicist at Montana State University. “It may be that by backing out we can get some vital clues to what’s happening.”

via Why Does the Sun’s Corona Get So Hot? NASA Launches Telescope to Find Out: Scientific American.

This artist’s impression shows the view from the exoplanet Gliese 667Cd looking towards the planet’s parent star (Gliese 667C). Image released on June 25, 2013.
CREDIT: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The habitable zone of a nearby star is filled to the brim with planets that could support alien life, scientists announced today (June 25).

An international team of scientists found a record-breaking three potentially habitable planets around the star Gliese 667C, a star 22 light-years from Earth that is orbited by at least six planets, and possibly as many as seven, researchers said. The three planet contenders for alien life are in the star’s “habitable zone” — the temperature region around the star where liquid water could exist. Gliese 667C is part of a three-star system, so the planets could see three suns in their daytime skies.

The three potentially rocky planets in Gliese 667C’s habitable zone are known as super-Earths — exoplanets that are less massive than Neptune but more massive than Earth. Their orbits make them possible candidates for hosting life, officials from the European Southern Observatory said in a statement.

via Found! 3 Super-Earth Planets That Could Support Alien Life | Gliese 667C | Space.com.

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