The FURST sounding rocket mission aims to study the Sun as a star, allowing researchers to compare our Sun to Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of other stars.
From Earth, one might be tempted to view the Sun as a unique celestial object like no other, as it’s the star our home planet orbits and the one our planet relies on most for heat and light. But if you took a step back and compared the Sun to the other stars NASA has studied over the years, how would it compare? Would it still be so unique?
“When we talk about ‘Sun as a star’, we’re treating it like any other star in the night sky as opposed to the unique object we rely on for human life. It’s so exciting to study the Sun from that vantage point,” said Adam Kobelski, institutional principal investigator for FURST and a research astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
“These are wavelengths that Hubble Space Telescope is really great at observing, so there is a decent amount of Hubble observations of stars in ultraviolet wavelengths, but we don’t have comparable observations of our star in this wavelength range,” saidis too sensitive to point at Earth’s Sun, new instruments were needed to get a spectrum of the entire Sun that is of a similar quality to Hubble’s observations of other stars.
“Our mission will obtain the first far ultraviolent spectrum of the Sun as a star,” Kankelborg said. “This is a key piece of information that has been missing for decades. With it, we will place the Sun in context with other stars.”“How well do the observations and what we know about our Sun compare to our observations or what we know of other stars?” Kobelski said. “You’d expect that we know all this information about the Sun – it’s right there – but it turns out, we actually don’t.
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