Fourteen years of hunting for solar eclipse: a team travels the world to study solar wind.

The solar system is constantly bathed by a sea of charged particles that emanate from the sun, and one research team spent 14 years chasing solar eclipses to learn more about this stellar spray.

The particles are known as the solar wind, and they come from the most distant region of the sun: the corona. If a person is fortunate enough to observe a total solar eclipse, they will certainly see this pearl region surrounding the sun. This melancholy zone has all the visual charm of a cosmic halo, but they are equal parties inferno. The corona is the warmest part of the sun, reaching temperatures of up to 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (more than 1 million degrees Celsius).

Scientists want to understand solar wind for many reasons. Much closer to Earth, the solar windshields us from dangerous cosmic radiation, but it can also disrupt communications satellites and space GPS systems. Its purpose was to observe the sun's corona over a slightly longer period than it takes the sun to complete a solar activity cycle, about 11 years.

The team made high-resolution observations of 11 total solar eclipses using cameras fitted with specialized filters. The researchers then compared their findings with data from NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) mission, which launched in 1997 and observes the solar wind from a place in space located about 1/100 the distance from Earth to the sun.

During the 11-year solar cycle, the star oscillates between periods of dormancy and volatile periods. When the sun is quiet, the star's face displays little sunspots. This is quite different from the volatile season of the sun, where sunspots and sunspots are common.

The sun's radically different appearance over the course of the solar cycle left these scientists surprised to find that, despite all the global solar changes that happen over the course of 11 years, their 14 years of observations showed no major temperature change for the inner-corona particles, which create the solar wind.

"Whatever is heating the majority of the corona and solar wind is not very dependent on the sun's activity cycle," Benjamin Boe, a solar researcher at the University of Hawaii involved in the new research, said in a NASA statement that describes the study.

"The temperature at the sources of the solar wind in the ring is almost constant throughout a solar cycle,' said Habbal in the statement. "This finding is unexpected because coronary structures are driven by changes in the distribution of magnetized plasmas in the corona, which vary so much throughout the 11-year magnetic solar cycle."

To solve this new mystery, the scientists plan to continue chasing total solar eclipses in the future to obtain more observations, according to NASA. The next total eclipse of the Sun will take place in December above the Antarctic.