New satellite imagery of the sun is providing scientists with clues to understanding the long-standing mystery of what is heating up the solar corona.

Sound waves escaping the sun's interior create fountains of hot gas that shape and power a thin region of the sun's atmosphere which appears as a ruby red "ring of fire" around the moon during a total solar eclipse.

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Solar physicists from Lockheed Martin and the Solar Physics and upper-Atmosphere Research Group at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Sheffield, UK have used computer modeling and some of the highest resolution images ever taken of the solar atmosphere to explain the cause of supersonic jets that continuously shoot through the low atmosphere of the Sun.

Atlanta, GA -- A team of astronomers, led by Alex Lobel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), announced today at the 203rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta that Hubble Space Telescope observations of a nearby supergiant star directly show hot gas escaping its boiling atmosphere at a larger distance than from any other star.

Goddard Space Flight Center -- Scientists got their closest-ever ultraviolet look at the Sun from space, thanks to a telescope and camera launched aboard a sounding rocket. The images revealed an unexpectedly high level of activity in a lower layer of the Sun's atmosphere (chromosphere).