Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved

xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."

In case anyone would like to read the paper...

[arcctgx]

It's on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0878 [arxiv.org]

Re:alternative

[sumdumass]

ah, gotcha. Right- so sorry i missread that.

I wrote it sort of sloppily in an attempt to mock the mods. I doesn't seem as clear as I thought it did at first so the confusion is probably my fault.

I find it funny when something like that is modded down and need to jump in to support the people. I have relatively good karma and it takes a couple more mod points to drop my posts into obscurity. I also like replying to the down modded points so as people will hit the parent button to see what the hell I'm talking about. That pretty much defeats the modded into oblivion problem and in a lot of cases ends up getting the parent post modded back up. I do have a few mod point trolls who will just mod every post down. Their favorite is overrated and they wasted about 9 points attempting to mod down a post about and all it's trailing comments I made about religion and science last week. I would classify myself as a troll, rather for standing up against the trolls.

Re:Nice outdated explanation

[Mac_OSX-1]

Electrically-powered Sun claims have far more severe problems than the standard solar model. The standard model difficulty in a thin layer above the photosphere. Electric Sun problems extend from the photosphere to the heliopause (~100 AU) and impacts everything from conservation of particle number and energy to radiation exposure of astronauts. Much of it can be demonstrated at the level of high-school AP physics.
See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model [blogspot.com]
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Model. I. [blogspot.com] II. [blogspot.com] III. [blogspot.com]
Electric Cosmos: Predictions [blogspot.com]