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The Sun's atmosphere is composed of five layers: the photosphere, the chromosphere, the transition region, the corona, and the heliosphere. The coolest layer of the Sun is a temperature minimum region extending to about 500 km above the photosphere, and has a temperature of about 4,100 K. [77]
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun.It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space.In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium.
On August 31, 2012, a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, erupted at 4:36 p.m. EDT. Flares take place in active regions and are characterized by a sudden increase of the radiative flux emitted from small regions of the corona.
Coronal mass ejections are large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that erupt from the sun’s outer atmosphere. The solar storms generated by the sun can affect electric ...
NASA animation showing Parker Solar Probe passing through the Sun's outer atmosphere, its corona, in April 2021. The boundary at the edge of the corona is the Alfvén critical surface. Inside that surface (circle at left), plasma connects to the Sun by waves traveling back and forth to the surface.
The photosphere, which is the atmosphere's lowest and coolest layer, is normally its only visible part. [1] Light escaping from the surface of the star stems from this region and passes through the higher layers. The Sun's photosphere has a temperature in the 5,770–5,780 K (5,500–5,510 °C; 9,930–9,940 °F) range.
The result is a thin, dusty atmosphere, called the interplanetary medium, which extends to at least 100 AU. [84] Activity on the Sun's surface, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, disturbs the heliosphere, creating space weather and causing geomagnetic storms. [85]
The core of the Sun is considered to extend from the center to about 0.2 of the solar radius (139,000 km; 86,000 mi). [1] It is the hottest part of the Sun and of the Solar System. It has a density of 150,000 kg/m 3 (150 g/cm 3) at the center, and a temperature of 15 million kelvins (15 million degrees Celsius; 27 million degrees Fahrenheit). [2]