The question "Why is the sun so hot?" rest of scientists

Magnets: How do they work?

Part of the problem is that we do not understand much about small-scale events on the Sun. We know that our role is to heat our planet and we generally know how. But the scale of the materials and the forces involved simply do not exist in a more accessible laboratory, and it is difficult to get close enough to the Sun to study it in detail.

The answer to most questions about the sun today seems to boil down to a version of the sun as a very complicated magnet. The Earth also turns its own magnetic field. But the Earth, despite the oceans and underground magma, is still much stronger than the Sun, which is just a big ball of gas and plasma. The Earth turns more or less like a solid object.

Not if the sun. The Sun rotates, but since it is not solid, its poles and equator rotate at different rates. The sun is also bubbling through its layers like a pot of boiling water. The effect is an entangled mess of magnetic field lines. The charged particles that make up the outer layers of the Sun traverse these lines like trains on high-speed lines. These lines creak and reconnect, releasing massive amounts of energy (solar flares) or leaving full twists of charged particles free to fly from these rails in space at a ridiculous speed (a coronal mass ejection ). But it is possible that below what we see, the Sun undergoes almost constant nanoflares – tiny clearings reaching tens of millions of degrees which, cumulatively, could give rise to the infernal temperatures of the crown.

A long time explanation have been the waves. Heat, after all, it's just particles that move very fast. The faster the particles move, the hotter they are. The scientists thought that the waves crossing the interior of the Sun could project the outermost layer of the Sun. But for decades, scientists have been able to measure the fact that acoustic waves (imagine vibrations that cross the Sun as sound waves propagate through the air) do not carry enough energy to be the source. But the Sun is full of many types of waves, so there are still others, including the Alfvén waves, which move specifically in the plasma and along magnetic lines, which is of particular interest. solar physicists.

Many satellites are already following the Sun, but the Parker solar probe, launched this year, is just beginning its observations. It will continue to observe until 2025. Scientists hope that by getting a view of the Sun as close as possible, it will answer these questions about nanoflares or waves of Alfvén or, as some already suspect, an even more complex combination of the two mechanisms.

Korey Haynes is a Astronomy contributing author.