For a research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal in May 2023, a team of heliophysicists recruited almost a thousand undergraduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder to investigate the mystery of coronal heating. Temperatures in the corona – the tenuous, outermost layer of the solar atmosphere – spike upwards of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, while just a thousand miles below, the underlying surface simmers at a balmy 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. How the Sun manages this feat remains one of the greatest unanswered questions in heliophysics and astrophysics. Scientists call it the coronal heating problem. The students involved in the study looked at solar flares that happened between 2011 and 2018, using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and NASA’s Miniature X-ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) missions. They tried to determine whether the flares could explain how the corona is heated. Music credit: "Evolving Pattern" by Raffael Gruber [GEMA] from Universal Production Music. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Producer: Susannah Darling (NASA/GSFC) Editor: Lacey Young, Susannah Darling (NASA/GSFC) Narration: Susannah Darling (NASA/GSFC) If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: null Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center · Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/nasagoddard · X: http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard · Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NASAGoddard · Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc