SOHO science highlights
Staring at the Sun
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has provided an unprecedented breadth and depth of information about the Sun, from its deep core to outer corona and the solar wind. These findings have been documented in an impressive, and growing, body of scientific and popular literature.
Some of the key results include:
- Revealing the first images ever of a star’s convection zone (its turbulent outer shell) and of the structure of sunspots below the surface.
- Providing the most detailed and precise measurements of the temperature structure, the interior rotation, and gas flows in the solar interior.
- Measuring the acceleration of the slow and fast solar wind.
- Identifying the source regions and acceleration mechanism of the fast solar wind in the magnetically "open" regions at the Sun's poles.
- Discovering new dynamic solar phenomena such as coronal waves and solar tornadoes.
- Revolutionising our ability to forecast space weather, by giving up to three days notice of Earth-directed disturbances, and playing a lead role in the early warning system for space weather.
- Monitoring the total solar irradiance (the ‘solar constant’) as well as variations in the extreme ultra violet flux, both of which are important to understand the impact of solar variability on Earth’s climate.
In addition to investigating how the Sun works, SOHO is the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history. It has tracked the destinies of more than 4000 of these icy mini-worlds as they endured fiery encounters with the Sun.
The majority were found by amateurs accessing realtime data online. While many of these sungrazing comets perish in the Sun’s heat, some survive, albeit in various states of degradation. SOHO has watched many comets lose their heads and tails during their solar encounters.
