NASA's COFFIES Center Makes Breakthrough on Solar Enigma

NASA researchers working with one of the agency's DRIVE science centers are closer to unraveling a long-standing solar mystery surrounding the extreme thinness of the Sun's tachocline layer, a region critical for creating space weather, a NASA blog posted Jul 07, 2026. The COFFIES center enabled a group of researchers to tackle a fundamental question about how the Sun works in a recent paper, according to the post by Desiree Apodaca of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The Sun consists of various layers that generate magnetic fields through a process called the solar dynamo. This magnetic engine powers solar activity, sparking solar flares and coronal mass ejections that dictate space weather cycles. Investigating these cycles is vital as space weather can impact astronaut safety, satellite communications and global navigation systems. The tachocline, sandwiched between the Sun's radiative and convective zones, is believed to serve as the main amplifier of the magnetic field, storing, organizing and releasing magnetic energy that eventually emerges at the solar surface as sunspots. The tachocline's extreme thinness long remained a mystery as earlier science models failed to replicate its unique and fluid behavior. The COFFIES team refined state-of-the-art computer models to produce a scenario that reveals the tachocline is essential in driving the solar dynamo while a fluctuating magnetic field is key for keeping the tachocline's signature thinness. These findings and methodologies were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.