Abstract
More than half a century ago, astronomers discovered that the Sun’s corona has an unexpectedly high temperature of a few million Kelvin (Sect. 2.1). The visible solar disk, the photosphere, is closer to the Sun’s center than the corona, but the photosphere is several hundred times cooler, and this comes as a big surprise. The essential paradox is that energy should not flow from the cooler photosphere to the hotter corona anymore than water should flow uphill. When you sit far away from a fire, for example, it warms you less.
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lang, K.R. (2009). Solving the Sun’s Heating Crisis. In: The Sun from Space. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76953-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76953-8_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76952-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76953-8
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