Ammon – The temperature of the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the surface of our star, represents one of the most interesting mysteries of the solar system.
Scientists at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory have made an important discovery related to the extreme heat of the sun’s corona, pointing to plasma waves as a possible cause.
The discovery, which combines experimental and simulation techniques, provides crucial insight into the long-standing mystery of why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface.
While the surface of the Sun burns at an intense temperature of around 5,500 degrees Celsius (10,000 degrees Fahrenheit), the outer atmosphere, known as the Sun’s corona, reaches temperatures from 1 million to 2 million degrees Celsius (1.8 million to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit) ). This is about 200 times hotter than the surface.
This large increase in temperature far from the surface of the Sun has puzzled scientists since 1939 when the high temperature of the corona was first recorded.
For decades, scientists have tried to find the mechanism behind the unexpected heating, but the mystery has remained unsolved.
However, a team led by Sayak Bose, a researcher at the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has recently made significant progress. The results suggest that visible plasma waves are likely responsible for heating coronal holes, which are low-density regions in the Sun’s corona with open magnetic field lines that extend a -into the interplant space. This discovery represents a major breakthrough in solving one of the most enduring mysteries about our nearest star.
“Scientists have known that coronal holes have high temperatures, but the underlying mechanism responsible for the heating is not well understood,” said Boss, lead author of the paper reporting the findings. in the Astrophysical Journal “Our results show that plasma wave reflection can do this job.
“Physicists have long speculated that Alfvén wave reflection could help explain coronal hole heating, but it has been impossible to verify in the laboratory or measure it directly,” Jason Tenbarge, a visiting researcher at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, said the first experimental proof that not only is Alfvén wave reflection possible, but also that the amount of energy reflected is sufficient for coronal holes. to heat up.”
In addition to conducting laboratory experiments, the team performed computer simulations of experiments that confirmed the appearance of Alfvén waves under conditions similar to coronal holes.
“RT”
