Temperature of the sun corona Patch#

'Despite being tiny by solar standards, each packs the wallop of a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb. 'The explosions are called nanoflares because they have one-billionth the energy of a regular flare,' Jim Klimchuk, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (opens in new tab) in Maryland, said in a statement. Research suggests that tiny explosions known as nanoflares may help push the temperature up by providing sporadic bursts reaching up to 18 million F (10 million C).

When you're roasting a marshmallow you move it closer to the fire to cook it, not farther away.' 'Things usually get cooler farther away from a hot source. 'That's a bit of a puzzle,' Jeff Brosius, a space scientist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. Why the corona is up to 300 times hotter (opens in new tab) than the photosphere, despite being farther from the solar core, has remained a long-term mystery. As the gases cool, they become the solar wind. Temperatures in the sun's corona (opens in new tab) can get as high as 3.5 million degrees F (2 million degrees C). It appears as white streamers or plumes of ionized gas that flow outward into space. Like the chromosphere, the sun's corona can only be seen during a total solar eclipse (or with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (opens in new tab)). The third layer of the sun's atmosphere is the corona. (Image credit: NASA/SDO) (opens in new tab) 'In order to have better predictions for space weather and geomagnetic storms,' Squire said, 'we have to understand more about how the corona works.The third layer of the sun's atmosphere is the corona. Indirectly, turbulence and ion cyclotron waves might one day take out your internet - unless we can see them coming. Squire said the reason those storms are so violent must be related to the ways in which the corona and solar wind heats up. They eventually came crashing back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere. In early February, a batch of recently launched SpaceX Starlink satellites were doomed after a geomagnetic storm hit them just after launch, preventing the broadband satellites from reaching their desired orbit. They send particles blazing across space that can cause geomagnetic storms, messing with our planet's magnetic field and disrupting satellites. While all this seems like a problem that's 100 million miles away from home, the corona - and the solar wind that blasts out of the sun - can wreak havoc on Earth. He points out that 'there may be multiple different mechanisms operating in different parts of the sun' and different mechanisms could be heating the corona in different ways. This doesn't necessarily mean the 'coronal heating problem' is solved, but Squire said the team has made important progress in understanding the phenomenon. Though the team didn't directly use data from NASA's Solar Probe in this paper, it did provide a point of comparison and its data seemed to match what the sun simulation spat out, giving the researchers confidence in their simulations. The computer simulations they performed show that turbulence drives the ion cyclotron waves, 'which effectively keeps the 'good bits' of both of the theories individually,' according to Squire.

So Squire and his co-authors basically shrugged their shoulders and asked: 'Well, why don't we have both?' They struggle to explain how the corona can get so hot on their own. The theories revolve around 'turbulence,' which heats up the corona by transferring energy from close to the sun outward, and a type of magnetic wave known as 'ion cyclotron waves.' The theories both have holes that don't line up with observations made by spacecraft and telescopes. 'What is nice about our result is that it links together two previous theories that had each been very well studied,' said Jonathan Squire, an astrophysicist at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Temperature of the sun corona Patch#

Their study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy, uses a six-dimensional simulation of a small patch of the sun's corona to analyze how particles are heated up and how they interact with the mammoth furnace's magnetic fields. Using a supercomputer, astrophysicists have been able to reconcile two of the major theories for the corona's extreme heat and show they match up neatly with observations taken by NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a tiny robot that recently became the first spacecraft to 'touch the sun.' It's known as the coronal heating problem. Why? That's a mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades. But in the outermost layer of its atmosphere called the corona, temperatures can reach 100 times higher. At 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the sun's surface seems like it would be one of the hottest places in our solar system.