The Sun’s Atmosphere is hotter than the surface

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

New research reveals the mystery of why the surface sun less hot than the atmosphere.

The question of the difference in temperature between the surface of the Sun and the atmosphere – also known as the corona – has been one of the fundamental puzzles that astronomers have pondered and studied for decades. .

For example, the Swedish scientist Hannes Alfvén in 1942 theorized that plasma magnetic waves could carry large amounts of energy across the Sun’s magnetic field from its interior to the corona, passing through the photosphere before exploding. them hot in the upper atmosphere of the sun.

Recently, during his research, a researcher from the University of Alabama, Syed Ayaz, said that the very hot nature of the sun’s corona could be caused by the behavior of small exciting waves in the plasma. Waves known as ‘kinetic Alfvén waves’ (KAWs) are wave-like magnetic field oscillations created by movements in the Sun’s orbit.

The research team led by Ayaz has a thesis that KAWs emit and heat the solar corona. Therefore, they are important, albeit small, mechanisms through which energy is transferred in the solar plasma.

According to Ayaz, this phenomenon can ultimately explain why the temperature difference on the surface of the sun can reach 5,500 degrees Celsius, while at the same time the temperature of the crown reaches 1.1 million degrees Celsius.

“For decades, Alfvén waves have been the best studied transporters of energy from place to place,” Ayaz said in a recent statement as cited by Space.comThursday (1/8).

Ayaz and his colleagues studied the effect of KAW on plasma floating up to a height of 10 times the radius of the sun.

“At such distances, when the waves interact with the solar flow plasma, which is full of ‘ions,’ atoms that have lost their electrons, the waves disperse quickly, ‘ transfer the energy completely to the plasma particles in the form of heating,” said Ayaz.

A study by Ayaz et al was published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.

The sun itself is almost entirely made up of plasma, which is a highly ionized gas that carries an electrical charge. The movement of this plasma in the convection zone – the upper part of the Sun’s interior – produces enormous electric currents and strong magnetic fields.

These fields are then dragged from the interior of the sun by convection, and slide to its surface where they can be seen in the form of dark sunspots. These sunspots are clusters of magnetic fields that can create different magnetic structures in the sun’s atmosphere.

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[Gambas:Video CNN]