Giant Waves Reveal Surprising True Size of Sun's Atmosphere

[rdunk]

Who said the Sun doesn't have an atmosphere?? Not only does it have a "solar atmosphere", it goes a waaaaaaaaaaaaay out there - like about 5 million miles above the Sun's surface.

Not a lot of info here, but a point of interest anyway - even if the data is about 7 years old!!~

Space.com, By Megan Gannon, News Editor,   June 27, 2014 04:45pm

Observations of the solar atmosphere

These observations, taken by NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO on Aug. 5, 2007, helped scientists define the outer limit of the sun's atmosphere.

The sun's volatile atmosphere is even bigger than expected, a NASA spacecraft revealed through observations of gigantic waves.

While the sun itself is 864,938 miles (1.392 million kilometers) wide, NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, found that the solar atmosphere, known as the corona, stretches 5 million miles (8 million km) above the sun's surface.

"We've tracked sound-like waves through the outer corona and used these to map the atmosphere," Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement from NASA. "We can't hear the sounds directly through the vacuum of space, but with careful analysis we can see them rippling through the corona."


http://www.space.com/26381-sun-atmosphere-size-nasa-spacecraft.html