NASA’s PUNCH catches first rainbow and other new images

Astronomer here! I’ve got a colleague at my university involved with this mission, and it’s a neat one! The [solar corona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_corona) is the outermost part of a star- think the rays coming out of it (though the corona proper is only visible during a total eclipse). Fascinatingly, it’s also *hotter* than the sun itself- like a million degrees C over 5500 C at the surface- and we don’t know why! Eventually though the particles in the corona cool and become part of the [heliosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere)- we don’t really get how that happens either!

There just a lot we don’t know about the corona, like what the outermost regions are like where it transitions into the [solar wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind) that affects Earth. [PUNCH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarimeter_to_Unify_the_Corona_and_Heliosphere) is aimed to answer this with 4 micro satellites that will image this area in 3D, and hopefully tell us what’s going on! It will be super cool to see what they find!