There have been reports from the Goddard Space Flight Centre about a strong evidence that scientists have got that provides clues to what actually makes the outer atmosphere of the sun much hotter than the surface. The evidence suggests that nanoflares provide the extra heat. Nanoflares are spontaneous bursts of heat, which happen constantly. They cannot be detected and studied separately.

This finding is based on just a six minute data from a sounding rocket of NASA. The Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph (EUNIS) mission that was launched in April of 2013 gathers data once every 1.3 seconds. It helps to track the properties of sun's material over a range of temperatures that prevail in the atmosphere of the sun.

When launched, a NASA rocket carried the EUNIS spacecraft to about 321 kilometres above the earth's crust. After only six minutes of observations there, the spacecraft started giving important new information to the NASA space centre. The EUNIS mission flies only for 15 minutes, but is capable of finding great new and vital information during this time.

The visible surface of the sun which is called photosphere has registered a temperature of 6,000 Kelvin whereas the temperature of corona reaches 300 times hotter temperature than the surface.

The spectrograph of EUNIS spacecraft was set to a wavelength which can read temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Kelvin as it has scanned programme of the sun, which scientists want to study more closely since it is magnetically complicated.

EUNIS has made a foundation for long-term flights into the celestial space and its findings will be of great use to the scientists in times to come. The next EUNIS launch is scheduled to take place in 2016 and scientists are hoping that they are able to further investigate the mysteries of the space.