{"id":798049,"date":"2025-09-05T06:21:26","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T11:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=798049"},"modified":"2025-09-05T06:21:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T11:21:26","slug":"why-solar-flares-are-way-hotter-than-researchers-thought-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=798049","title":{"rendered":"Why solar flares are way hotter than researchers thought : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of a mid-level solar flare on Jan. 12, 2015.
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NASA\/Goddard Space Flight Center\/Solar Dynamics Observatory<\/p>\n

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Beautiful yet dangerous solar flares that erupt from the sun could be as hot as 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, researchers say.<\/p>\n

That’s more than six times hotter than solar physicists previously believed, according to a new report<\/u> in Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Alexander Russell<\/u>, a physicist with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, called that temperature “a crazy number” that he and his colleagues found “incredible.”<\/p>\n

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Solar flares occur when magnetic energy gets suddenly released and dumped into particles. These particles, ions and electrons, get heated up and shoot out at great speed.<\/p>\n

Previously, researchers used telescopes to measure the temperature of electrons in solar flares. “And we’ve kind of just assumed, well, the ion temperature would be the same as the electron temperature,” says Russell.<\/p>\n

But recent computer simulations and measurements in near-Earth space suggest that this assumption is wrong: They show that ions heat up way more.<\/p>\n