NASA's First IRIS Images Offer New Look at the Sun

The first images from NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) telescope were made public today, offering a fresh glimpse of a little-observed region of the Sun.

IRIS first aimed its lens at the Sun on July 17, capturing for the first time images of the mysterious lower layers of the Sun's atmosphere.

Adrian Daw, the mission scientist for IRIS at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, said the IRIS images "are going to help us understand how the sun's lower atmosphere might power a host of events around the sun."

"Anytime you look at something in more detail than has ever been seen before, it opens up new doors to understanding. There's always that potential element of surprise."

IRIS's first images produced what NASA called "crisp and clear" data that shows "unprecedented detail of this little-observed region" of the Sun. Images of never-before-seen "fibril-like structures" shed light on the huge temperature variances in the observation region. The images also show spots on the Sun that rapidly brighten and dim, which provides clues to how energy is transported and absorbed throughout the region.

Studying the Sun's lower atmosphere has long fascinated solar scientists because it is expected that what goes on in the lower atmosphere is linked to what happens in the star's upper atmosphere, or corona, where temperatures exceed 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (100,000 C), almost a thousand-fold hotter than the Sun's surface.

IRIS is uniquely designed to study the Sun's atmosphere, also known as the interface region, in more detail than ever before.

Understanding the interface region is important, NASA says, because it "forms the ultraviolet emission that impacts near-Earth space and Earth's climate."

Energy traveling through the region also correlates with extreme space weather events near Earth, which can affect satellites, power grids and global positioning systems.

Better knowledge of what's going on in the interface region will undoubtedly enhance our knowledge of space weather events, but the IRIS data set is vast and researchers have their work cut out for themselves.

"There is much work ahead to understand what we're seeing," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. "But the quality of the data will enable us to do that."