NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory Catches “Surfer” Waves on the Sun

Cue the surfing music. Scientists have spotted the iconic surfer's wave rolling through the atmosphere of the sun. This makes for more than just a nice photo-op: the waves hold clues as to how energy moves through that atmosphere, known as the corona.

Since scientists know how these kinds of waves -- initiated by a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability if you're being technical -- disperse energy in the water, they can use this information to better understand the corona. This in turn, may help solve an enduring mystery of why the corona is thousands of times hotter than originally expected.

"One of the biggest questions about the solar corona is the heating mechanism," says solar physicist Leon Ofman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and Catholic University, Washington. "The corona is a thousand times hotter than the sun's visible surface, but what heats it up is not well-understood. People have suggested that waves like this might cause turbulence which cause heating, but now we have direct evidence of Kelvin-Helmholtz waves."

Ofman and his Goddard colleague, Barbara Thompson, spotted these waves in images taken on April 8, 2010. These were some of the first images caught on camera by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a solar telescope with outstanding resolution that launched on February 11, 2010 and began capturing data on March 24 of that year. The team's results appeared online in Astrophysical Journal Letters on May 19, 2011 and will be published in the journal on June 10.