![]() ![]() Scientists looked to the sun’s properties to explain this disparity. Edlén and Grotrian’s finding that the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the photosphere – despite being further from the sun’s core, its ultimate source of energy – has led to much head-scratching in the scientific community. Over many decades of study, scientists have consistently estimated the photosphere’s temperature at around 6,000 degrees C (11,000 degrees F). We just need to measure the light that reaches us from the sun, and compare it to spectrum models that predict the temperature of the light’s source. Estimating the photosphere’s heat has always been relatively straightforward. This represents temperatures up to 1,000 times hotter than the photosphere beneath it, which is the surface of the sun that we can see from Earth. That’s when the Swedish spectroscopist Bengt Edlén and the German astrophysicist Walter Grotrian first observed phenomena in the sun’s corona that could only be present if its temperature was a few million degrees Celsius. The coronal heating problem has been established since the late 1930s. It has validated Alfvén’s 80-year-old theory and taken us a step closer to harnessing this high-energy phenomenon here on Earth. Our recent study has finally achieved this. We needed empirical observation that these waves existed. Scientists had tentatively accepted the theory, but we still needed proof. ![]() The energy bypasses the photosphere before exploding with heat in the sun’s upper atmosphere. He theorized that magnetized waves of plasma could carry huge amounts of energy along the sun’s magnetic field from its interior to the corona. In 1942, the Swedish scientist Hannes Alfvén proposed an explanation. It represents a fundamental puzzle that astrophysicists have mulled over for decades. This spike in temperature, despite the increased distance from the sun’s main energy source, has been observed in most stars. The corona reaches a million degrees C or higher (over 1.8 million degrees F). But a few thousand kilometers above it – a small distance when we consider the size of the sun – the solar atmosphere, also called the corona, is hundreds of times hotter. The visible surface of the sun, or the photosphere, is around 6,000 degrees Celsius (11,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The sun’s atmosphere via Mongta Studio/ Shutterstock.īy Marianna Korsos, Aberystwyth University and Huw Morgan, Aberystwyth University Burning questions about the sun’s atmosphere ![]()
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