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Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved
xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."
Indeed. If you look closely with filtered binoculars (10x magnification or so will do fine), you can make out darker areas on the surface, which spell "Philips", just like any other electrically powered lightbulb.
Or, to put it another way... the Sun is not "powered by electricity". It's essentially a huge, ongoing, thermonuclear reaction.
Goes to show that you should pay attention to what you're listening to.
This is one of the first things I asked my fiancee when she was studying solar physics (specifically magnetohydrodynamics or MHD). The answer I always got was "we don't know yet." It's nice to see some new research in this area, coupled with an explanation that a non-physicist can at least grasp.
Don't force your Electric Sun God on ME!!!
That's pretty funny. But it's about as correct as me saying, "Sorry for all the 'nanoflares', I had granola this morning and burritos this afternoon. If the sun wasn't so drunk, he would just stop lighting my flares and laughing insanely each time."
Are they advocating a hands-on approach to rocketry?
Because Eugene Parker, an astrophysicist, put forward the idea in 1987 that microflares may provide the mechanism behind the heating of the sun's corona and the mechanism behind microflares is hypothesized to be magnetic reconnection.
And from Wikipedia: The Magnetic reconnection theory relies on the solar magnetic field to induce electric currents in the solar corona. The electric currents then collapse suddenly, releasing energy as heat and wave energy in the corona.
So it would appear that electric currents are involved in the heating of the sun's corona.
Is it a theory that explains all this or there are proven facts, too?
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Clearly the sun is producing way too much heat and energy- wasting its resources by not internalizing its combustion. I think we need to ban the sun, have a few rallies and focus on greener alternatives untill it can make changes.
..that's (9/5 * (several-million - 273) + 32) Fahrenheit (F)
You're welcome! ;)
Field lines are a metaphor useful in understanding certain physical processes. Ask "any electrical engineer" what happens when a voltage opposes a current. The answer is heating. Ask "any electrical engineer" if energy is stored in magnetic fields. The answer is yes. Reconnection is a way of describing the change in magnetic topology during resistive heating; it is useful when the large-scale magnetic fields are better known than the small-scale electric fields. It is entirely equivalent the same electrical concepts we learned in high school.
I think we have found the next location for Burning Man! *Any pictures taken at the event would be destroyed...
I think "solved" is a strong word to use for saying essentially, "its hot because of hot spots."
It's on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0878
Wow, the sun really IS a mass of incandescent gas!
the real culprit is a quantum flux.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/sci_fi_writer_attributes?utm_source=a-section
Mod above post +1 inspired genius... When you realize the government has only just 'allowed' the mass production of wireless energy, especially since it was invented 100 years ago. You can see that there is a movement to suppress concepts of free electric energy, or widespread electrical transport within the universe. I wonder who might be against that... Power Companies, Military...
Don't be disheartened. Since we don't even know the mechanisms behind Gravity I find it hilarious it has so many zealots. We can't find it on a subatomic level, and it doesn't work as expected on a galactic level. It also predicts that 96% of the universe is invisible to us. I would say at the very least that we understand Electricity far better than we understand Gravity.
OK, these new flares are small. I get it. But are these new flares 1 billion times smaller than a 'normal' solar flare? That's what the prefix indicates.
When the dark matter/dark energy theories first started coming around, my first thought was, "That sounds like a fudge." The universe was not behaving the way theory predicts - the rotation rates of the galaxies did not go the way that gravity predicted. So, dark matter was proposed to create more mass where none could be seen, to restore balance to the universe. The add-ons continued, to the point where astrophysics now suggests that an overwhelming percentage of the physical universe is invisible and indetectable. Which sounded strange, but I let it pass having other things to occupy my mind, and three kids to boot.
I ran across the plasma cosmology through sf author James Hogan, and I read a little more, and it does explain some things that conventional theories do not, and often, it does so much more simply. In the case of the rotation of spiral arms, it suggests that electrical currents are affecting the rotation speed - without recourse to invisible matter. Electromagnetism is 40 or so orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, so, hey, that might make a difference, seeing as 99% of the visible universe is plasma. In the case of the sun, if these electrical currents are out there in the galaxy, then it suggests that we are in the middle of them too, and like the above post suggests, the solar wind does pretty much meet the definition of an electrical current.
The anonymous coward's tone is a little abrasive, but modding him down for espousing a non-mainstream viewpoint is not cool, imho. There's some interesting thinking going on. And won't we all be embarrassed if, a hundred years from now, the hip people look on our astrophysics with dark matter and dark energy as a more recent version of epicycles?
Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
This will probably sound like crap, but, if anybody out there has had to deal with heat in any real form, they would have found that the greatest heat was never at the surface. Light a flame - the heat isn't at the yellow outer edge, it isn't in the centre, it's precisely where the blue cone terminates. Why should the sun be any different. Yes I know it's a nuclear phenomenon, but FFS, the evidence stands for itself. Oh, sorry, this is Discovery science on /. these days. maybe I should swear and say wow a few times !
The "explanation" shifts the blame to "nanoflares". Why? Well, because "These temperatures can only be produced by impulsive energy bursts". But just because that is the only mechanism James Klimchuk can think of does not mean that there is no other mechanism. Indeed, anomalous extreme temperatures have been observed in coronal-alike plasmas under laboratory conditions: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf. No "nanoflares" in that 0.4 Torr Pyrex cylinder.
This is typical overconfidence in theory. The reasoning is: nature must obey our currently accepted theories, and within the context of those theories I see only one possible cause, so that must be it. Such hubris. The accepted theories are likely to be incomplete, and might be downright wrong in places.
Then there is the title of the post: "Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved" Finely tuned to plant the mistaken belief in the mind of the Slashdot crowd that it has been figured out. Nothing more to see here. Please move along. After all, we don't want people to get a clue as to what is actually producing all that energy needed to keep the corona piping hot, do we?
So the sun being perceived as a thermonuclear as opposed to an electrical phenomenon somehow works in favor of the power companies? Or is it the military? I really have no idea how the Electrical Universe not being mainstream somehow keeps us from having free energy. If you can use EU to gather energy from nowhere, all you need to do is implement it. And no, the big companies can hardly do anything against it if you open-source your findings and spam it across half the internet. The Streisand effect works.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Which is why I find it truly amazing that we have ANY zealots in the fields of science. if there is ONE thing we have learned of in the past 100 years it is this: The forces at work in just the universe we can see is on a truly incredible scale, and with every new piece of hardware, with every new scientific telescope or collider, we learn that we are truly at our infancy at this stage when it comes to understanding the universe.
Is the universe electric? Fuck if I know! The simple fact is we don't really have a definitive answer on much of anything ATM, because all our models break down at the sub atomic or immense scale of galaxies. trust me, all this stuff that folks are so sure about now will probably turn out to be as much bullshit as the surety that the world was flat. All we can do is put forth new ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem, and test and prove or disprove them. And with each new advance we will get another tiny piece of the puzzle and maybe in a few centuries if we don't blow ourselves up or have a natural disaster we may finally figure out WTF is going on here.
But putting someone down for looking at things a different way gets us nowhere. We have to dream, and look outside the box, and come up with new ways and new ideas and new uses for the machines and the data we have so far. Because that is how we learn folks. Questions and theories and possible dead ends that will hopefully point us in another direction that is more on the money. I for one am happy to hear and look at any theory that helps explain where we are and what we know about this gigantic wonderland around us. just because something can't be proven ATM doesn't mean that in 50 years we won't trip over something and go "Ohhh...now I get it!". Zealotry and the suppression of differing viewpoints is never a good idea. If we don't constantly challenge our notions and put for new theories, then how will we learn?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."
People, couldn't we just be happy that we better understand something about the universe without trying to contrive some kind of relevance? Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Science doesn't need an immediate application to be important.
'zactly. If the past 1000 years has taught us anything it's that mainstream scientists like to shout down people with theories that challenge their dogma until those theories are proven correct. Then they pat the guy on the back and say "Oops, sorry, you were right, we were all wrong. Look how willing to learn we all are. You're now our new hero. But if anyone challenges this new dogma we're gonna kick his ass."
So go and find evidence that your theories are correct. Have the better theory, win the Nobel.
Don't get a fucking persecution complex and claim that everyone else is wrong because they hate you.
If you're not willing to find supporting evidence, and you are willing to ignore flaws and contradicting evidence in your own theory, then you can go fuck yourself with barbed wire for all that anyone will care.
Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. II. III.
Electric Cosmos: Predictions