MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE SOLVING THE SUN’S BURNING MYSTERY

Scientists have spent decades trying to figure out why the Sun’s atmosphere heats to extreme temperatures

David Crookes

Walk carefully over to a fire and you’ll find it gets hotter the closer you get. As you walk away you start to feel cooler again. But if you were to do that at the surface of the Sun, the opposite would happen. You’d walk away from the intense heat, start to feel cooler and then suddenly begin to feel hot again. Moving far away from this hot source only puts you in the midst of an even hotter upper atmosphere. Although the Sun’s surface burns at a blisteringly hot 6,000 degrees Celsius (10,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the outermost layer of our host star’s atmosphere – which extends thousands of miles above the visible surface – reaches temperatures of around 1 to 2 million degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 million degrees…

You're reading a preview of

All About Space Annual (Digital) - 1 Issue, All About Space Annual (2024)

DiscountMags is a licensed distributor (not a publisher) of the above content and Publication through Zinio LLC. Accordingly, we have no editorial control over the Publications. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including those made in Publications offered on our website, are those of the respective author(s) or publisher(s) and not of DiscountMags. DiscountMags does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, or usefulness of all or any portion of any publication or any services or offers made by third parties, nor will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on information contained in any Publication, or your use of services offered, or your acceptance of any offers made through the Service or the Publications. For content removal requests, please contact Zinio.