Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved 56
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."
Re:Nice outdated explanation (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. If you look closely with filtered binoculars (10x magnification or so will do fine), you can make out darker areas on the surface, which spell "Philips", just like any other electrically powered lightbulb.
Or, to put it another way... the Sun is not "powered by electricity". It's essentially a huge, ongoing, thermonuclear reaction.
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Don't force your Electric Sun God on ME!!!
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When the dark matter/dark energy theories first started coming around, my first thought was, "That sounds like a fudge." The universe was not behaving the way theory predicts - the rotation rates of the galaxies did not go the way that gravity predicted. So, dark matter was proposed to create more mass where none could be seen, to restore balance to the universe. The add-ons continued, to the point where astrophysics now suggests that an overwhelming percentage of the physical universe is invisible and i
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See:
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Resistor Model [blogspot.com]
Electric Cosmos: The Solar Capacitor Mo
Answers one of my burning questions... (Score:5, Interesting)
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They need to change their logo! (Score:4, Insightful)
alternative (Score:3, Funny)
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Your comment was marked flamebait because with the article's wording "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" along with your mocking the global warming zealots attempts of banning all things that don't fit their world hit too close to home.
The science is settled BTW, we already know all there is to know about how the sun warms the Earth and what causes global warming. Any inform
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I think you don't know what I know. The comment was a bashing on the mods who modded you down, not an attack on you.
The zealots say the science is settled, that it's a fact and undeniable, the article says this discovery paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere, You comment joked about their attempts to ban everything that's detrimental to the earth as they know it (or at least that's how it is perceived), that is why you were modded Flamebait.
The point I was making is tha
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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 talk
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real Americans use Rankine (F + 460) for absolute temperature - We don't use them Gawdless frogger-varmint socialist measures!
In case anyone would like to read the paper... (Score:5, Informative)
It's on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0878 [arxiv.org]
but according to other sources ... (Score:2)
the real culprit is a quantum flux.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/sci_fi_writer_attributes?utm_source=a-section
Nanoflares, huh? (Score:1)
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Light a flame - the heat isn't at the yellow outer edge, it isn't in the centre, it's precisely where the blue cone terminates. Why should the sun be any different. Yes I know it's a nuclear phenomenon, but FFS, the evidence stands for itself. Oh, sorry, this is Discovery science on /. these days. maybe I should swear and say wow a few times !
Well you've got the invalid-analogy and the proof-by-assertion already, so why not? I look forward to seeing you on TV.
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The hot blue part of a flame is at the bottom, whereas the corona is on the topside of the sun. That is not the same.
Mystery NOT solved (Score:3, Insightful)
The "explanation" shifts the blame to "nanoflares". Why? Well, because "These temperatures can only be produced by impulsive energy bursts". But just because that is the only mechanism James Klimchuk can think of does not mean that there is no other mechanism. Indeed, anomalous extreme temperatures have been observed in coronal-alike plasmas under laboratory conditions: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf [arxiv.org]. No "nanoflares" in that 0.4 Torr Pyrex cylinder.
This is typical overconfidence in theory. The reasoning is: nature must obey our currently accepted theories, and within the context of those theories I see only one possible cause, so that must be it. Such hubris. The accepted theories are likely to be incomplete, and might be downright wrong in places.
Then there is the title of the post: "Mystery of Sun's Outer Atmosphere Solved" Finely tuned to plant the mistaken belief in the mind of the Slashdot crowd that it has been figured out. Nothing more to see here. Please move along. After all, we don't want people to get a clue as to what is actually producing all that energy needed to keep the corona piping hot, do we?
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The biggest problem with science reporting is that the reporter, even if they understand what the scientist says, has to "dumb it down" for the masses. Depending on the publication, there is a different level of "dumb it down", presumably to match the expected readership. That all goes out the window when the reporter DOESN'T understand the science, and is just reporting "news". Most scientists who haven't made a point of talking to laymen in their field suck at dumbing down their own work, so either they
Knowlege is valuable (Score:1)
"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."
People, couldn't we just be happy that we better understand something about the universe without trying to contrive some kind of relevance? Knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Science doesn't need an immediate application to be important.