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transition region

noun

, Astronomy.
  1. a thin and very irregular layer of the sun's atmosphere that separates the hot corona from the much cooler chromosphere.


transition region

  1. The area in a seed-bearing plant where the vascular tissue of the root changes into the vascular tissue of the stem. In eudicotyledons, the roots have a solid cylinder of vascular tissue surrounded by cortex. The vascular tissues gradually branch apart and reorient themselves in the stem around a central pith.
  2. The thin layer of the solar atmosphere that separates the chromosphere from the corona. In the transition region, temperatures increase from a relatively cool 20,000°K in the chromosphere to the 1,000,000°K and higher temperatures of the corona. Transition region chemistry involves the ionization of hydrogen and other elements; the light produced by this region comes from ionized forms of carbon, oxygen, and silicon.


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Example Sentences

“Retrospectively it made sense that there should be a transition region where the interstellar magnetic field bunches up and drapes against the heliosphere,” says Jamie Rankin, deputy project scientist for the Voyager mission and a space physicist at Princeton University.

And the results of Rankin and her team’s study suggest that the magnetic fields pile up less toward the heliosphere’s portside flank, meaning that a probe passing through this transition region, as opposed to the thicker draping on the other side, could more rapidly access pristine interstellar space.

“It’s going to give us a really nice ability to study what happens in this transition region—from being a frozen ice ball out in the Oort cloud to a fully active comet in the solar system.”

By comparison, Voyager 2 did not encounter a region where the plasma stagnates, instead passing through a so-called transition region where the flow of plasma from the sun begins to change in strength and direction, followed by a “boundary layer” where incoming cosmic ray particles increase, and then a clean break through the heliopause.

For example, the electromechanical properties of ferroelectric materials are greatly enhanced in a transition region known as a morphotropic phase boundary.

From Nature

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