NASA Captures Unprecedented Views of Sun's Mystery Layer

During its first six months in space, NASA's IRIS telescope has snapped stunning images of an obscure layer of the sun, revealing previously unseen violence and complexity in the lowest slivers of our star's atmosphere, scientists say.

The IRIS Observatory launched in June and its name is short for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. The small spacecraft is designed to collect data on the interface region, a little-understood area spanning the 3,000 to 6,000 miles between the solar surface and outer atmosphere, or corona.

Scientists have hoped IRIS could shed light on some of the sun's secrets, such as why temperatures shoot from 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the sun's surface to about 1.8 million degrees F at the corona. Researchers working on the mission presented some of the probe's observations thus far Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco Read more...