(CNN) -- How do the outer reaches of the sun get so hot?
That's one of the
questions that NASA has set out to answer by launching a new telescope
that will stare into a mysterious zone between the sun's surface and
outer atmosphere.
Material that travels
through the region, known as the solar chromosphere, heats up from about
10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius) at the sun's surface
to temperatures as high as 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million
degrees celsius) farther out, according to NASA.
The agency says its IRIS spacecraft,
which reached its orbit Thursday evening after taking off from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will angle its telescope to
study "how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up" in the
chromosphere on its way to the outer atmosphere, the corona.
"IRIS will show the solar
chromosphere in more detail than has ever been observed before," Adrian
Daw, deputy project scientist, said in a NASA article ahead of the launch. "My opinion is that we are bound to see something we didn't expect to see."
What causes the corona's intense heat has been "a scientific mystery for more than 50 years," according to NASA's Solar System Exploration unit. Information
gathered by previous space missions suggests one source could be a
magnetic field covering the sun's surface, the unit says.
Scientists are also
interested in the chromosphere because it generates most of the sun's
ultraviolet rays that affect Earth's climate.
The data gathered by
IRIS, which stands for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, will add
to the work of two other missions that will monitor the sun's surface
and outer atmosphere.