The Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is several times hotter than the surface. This remains one of the major mysteries of our solar system. A team of researchers led by Richard Harrison, astronomer at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, near Oxford, UK, has photographed some never-before-seen solar phenomena with the Solar Heliosperic Observatory (SOHO) satellite: flashes of ultraviolet light apparently produced by blobs of gas bursting on the Sun's surface. This will go a long way in solving the mystery. The observations were made while watching a part of the Sun's surface over the course of an hour. The researchers could see small patches of the Sun brighten and then fade away completely. These blobs are the size of the Earth and pump enormous energy into the corona. This they do by interacting with the Sun's magnetic field, suggests Harrison. As solar convection currents carry the bursting blobs to the Sun's surface, they are sometimes hit by energy discharges from the Sun's roiling magnetic field. Such discharges can split the blobs into half. The lower half crashes back onto the surface, while the upper half escapes into the corona, where it releases the energy (Discover , Vol 19, No 5).
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