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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.
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.
It's on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0878
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.