![]() The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the Suns surface. The corona is the outermost part of the Suns atmosphere. They've observed the jets before, but there were unfortunately too few observations to get conclusive evidence. Our Sun is surrounded by a jacket of gases called an atmosphere. One proof could be plasma jets, which scientists expect to be produced by the reconnection process. "We need to find proofs that (magnetic reconnection) is really the story" says Gurman. Soon thereafter, the X-ray Sun was discovered by Burnight (1949) using a pinhole camera on-board a rocket. ![]() Naval Research Laboratory using captured German military V2 rockets ( Baum et al., 1946 ). As a direct consequence of this theory, the heating process should occur much closer to the surface of the Sun than previously thought, but no one really knows how close. The ultraviolet emission from the hot corona was first detected on 10 October 1946 with instruments built by Tousey and his colleagues at the U.S. Experts do not even agree on the approximate length of time these patches remain active. No one has directly observed any magnetic field reconnection. It's a faily inefficient source of energy, but the sheer number of these small magnetic patches on the surface of the Sun makes the process a viable solution to the 50 year old problem of what heats the solar corona.Īll is not quite clear yet. Because the laws of electromagnetism prohibit the intersection of two magnetic field lines, every time magnetic field lines come close to crossing they are "rearranged," and this magnetic reconnection continuously heats the solar corona. Now most scientists believe that the heating of the corona is linked to the interaction of the magnetic field lines radiating out of the small patches mentioned above. But there was a problem with that theory: those giant loops disappeared during solar minima, while the corona does not. The whole range of ionization of an atom can be found: for example, oxygen I (neutral) is found in the photosphere, oxygen II through VI (one to five electrons removed) in the chromosphere, and oxygen VII and VIII in the corona. Physicists have long known that the Sun’s magnetic fields make its corona much hotter than the surface of the star itself. When astronomers observe the Sun from space at ultraviolet wavelengths, the chromosphere is found to emit lines formed at high temperatures, spanning the range from 10,000 to 1,000,000 K. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. They thought the heat energy was coming from the active regions, where the spectacular giant loops are seen in Ultra-Violet and X-rays. The enduring mystery of the solar corona Taken from the September 2021 issue of Physics World. According to Joseph Gurman, an astrophysicist at the Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at the Goddard Space Flight Center, people already suspected that magnetic fields were playing an active role in the Solar Corona problem.
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