Immense Energy 'Sparkles' and Strange 'Highways' Observed on Sun [VIDEO]

Some of the sharpest images of the solar atmosphere ever captured reveal details of unknown "highways" and intriguing "sparkles" - features of the Sun that NASA astronomers plan to further analyze to better understand our stars complex state of existence.

NASA's new High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) was only in orbit a short time, launched briefly into space onboard a sounding rocket, but it observed the Sun's large, magnetically active sunspot region to find a number of previously unknown solar features, including blobs of gas ricocheting along solar "highways" and bright dots scientists are calling "sparkles" because they seem to switch on and off rapidly. The sparkles appear to be along magnetic field lines where huge amounts of energy are released.

Hi-C's foray into space yielded observations that may help better explain why the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface, or photosphere.

The novel camera has proven to be a boon for researchers studying the Sun.

"Hi-C's is "effectively a microscope that lets us view small scale events on the Sun in unprecedented detail," Robert Walsh director of research at the University of Central Lancashire, said in a statement.

"For the first time we can unpick the detailed nature of the solar corona, helping us to predict when outbursts from this region might head towards the Earth."

Walsh told BBC News that scientists have long puzzled over why the Sun's corona is millions of degrees hotter than the rest of the star.

"The sparkles - we actually call them extreme ultraviolet dots - we believe are evidence of very localized but frequent energy release that could build up and heat the corona very easily."

Walsh said the sparkles themselves are gigantic in size, each one is about the width equivalent of the United Kingdom and each releases an equally immense amount of energy.

"Consider the consumption of energy in the UK in an entire year - it gets released in one of these dots in about 20-30 seconds," Walsh said.

Regarding the "highways," Walsh said they give researchers a better idea about the prominent layer of dense plasma called the solar filament.

"The plasma was moving in opposite directions, back and fore, like on a motorway," said Walsh. "We've never seen that before and that gives us an idea about the fundamental scale in the filaments."

Photos and research from the Hi-C mission were presented at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting this week in St. Andrews, Scotland.