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The Secret of the Sun's Heated Atmosphere

Posted by kdawson on from the ooh-shiny dept.

eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."

3 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Ah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...but does it run solaris?

  2. Re:Did anybody else think... by SleptThroughClass · · Score: 5, Funny

    Imagine a Milky Way cluster of these...

  3. Alfvén is smiling in his grave! by APODNereid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are astrophysicists just unaware, or are they being malicious? Neither.

    They have spent a decade or three researching magnetic reconnection - in the lab, via in situ space probes, and by remote sensing (a.k.a. using telescopes) - and have developed descriptions of the behaviours of plasmas, building on Alfvén's work and these discoveries, that match the observed phenomena nicely.

    Take a look at the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (http://mrx.pppl.gov/), as an example of lab-based plasma physics work on magnetic reconnection.

    But maybe you know something about the behaviour of plasmas that the thousands of researchers - experimentalists, theorists, 'observers', and those who simulate plasmas in computers - don't, or have missed?

    Why not write a paper to Nature, or Science, giving chapter and verse of the holes in their work?