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Sun corona sphere5/18/2023 ![]() The Sun is composed almost entirely of plasma, which is highly ionized gas that carries an electrical charge. Scientists looked to the Sun’s properties to explain this disparity. The extreme heat of the Sun’s corona is one of the most vexing problems in astrophysics. Our recent study has finally achieved this, validating Alfvén’s 80-year-old theory and taking us a step closer to harnessing this high-energy phenomenon here on Earth. The theory had been tentatively accepted – but we still needed proof, in the form of empirical observation, that these waves existed. 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, bypassing the photosphere before exploding with heat in the Sun’s upper atmosphere. In 1942, the Swedish scientist Hannes Alfvén proposed an explanation. This spike in temperature, despite the increased distance from the Sun’s main energy source, has been observed in most stars and represents a fundamental puzzle that astrophysicists have mulled over for decades. ![]() 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, reaching a million degrees Celsius or higher. ![]() The visible surface of the Sun, or the photosphere, is around 6,000☌. ![]()
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