Posted on 06/06/2019 12:08:09 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...why is its outer atmosphere hotter than its fiery surface?
University of Michigan researchers believe they have the answer, and hope to prove it with help from NASA's Parker Solar Probe. In roughly two years, the probe will be the first manmade craft to enter the zone surrounding the sun where heating looks fundamentally different than what has previously been seen in space. This will allow them to test their theory that the heating is due to small magnetic waves travelling back and forth within the zone...
Such high temperatures cause the solar atmosphere to swell to many times the diameter of the sun and they're the reason we see the extended corona during solar eclipses. In that sense, Kasper says, the coronal heating mystery has been visible to astronomers for more than half a millenium, even if the high temperatures were only appreciated within the last century.
This same zone features hydromagnetic "Alfvén waves" moving back and forth between its outermost edge and the sun's surface. At the outermost edge, called the Alfvén point, the solar wind moves faster than the Alfvén speed, and the waves can no longer travel back to the sun...
In trying to estimate how far from the sun's surface this preferential heating stops, U-M's team examined decades of observations of the solar wind by NASA's Wind spacecraft. They looked at how much of helium's increased temperature close to the sun was washed out by collisions between ions in the solar wind as they traveled out to Earth...
Those calculations put the outer edge of the superheating zone roughly 10 to 50 solar radii from the surface. It was impossible to be more definitive since some values could only be guessed at.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Why is the Sun's outer atmosphere hotter than its fiery surface? Thanks to NASA's Parker Solar Probe, University of Michigan researchers believe they will soon have an answer. In roughly two years, the probe will be the first manmade craft to enter the zone of preferential heating boundary. The Parker Solar Probe lifted off in August 2018 and had its first rendezvous with the sun in November 2018 -- already getting closer to the sun than any other human-made object. In the coming years, Parker will get even closer with each pass until the probe falls below the Alfvén point. In their paper, Kasper and Klein predict it should enter the zone of preferential heating in 2021 as the boundary expands with increasing solar activity. Then, NASA will have information direct from the source to answer all manner of long-standing questions. This research is led by Justin Kasper, an Associate Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at U-M. | Solving the Sun's burning mystery | Michigan Engineering | Published on June 4, 2019 | YouTube
Could try, but I don't like the odds of success, and I mean in several different ways.
Send a spaceship full of them out there with bags of ice.
That'll work, as long as they go at night. Or during an eclipse.
Parker almost had to build this, they've never gotten over the embarrassment of having Fisher beat them to the space pen.
Is that basically correct?
Pffft.
Just give ‘em some Copper Tone and sunglasses.
They’ll be fine.
It’s frigging June and last night was 43 degrees.
I WANT MY GLOBAL WARMING!
Regarding this and other probes: It is a very bad idea to f*** around with the sun.
Solar wind heats up planet Jupiter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3740786/posts
Why waste the ice? You’d have room for more of them if you skipped the ice.
I’m just saying, if we’re going to send a spaceship to the Sun filled with asshat climate commies, lets pack as many of them in there (comfortably of course, at least for the launch) as we can.
We could name the ship the Pinocet!
Forget the solar wind, you need The Summer Wind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DopzOCeKJc
As a matter of fact, we could pipe this in to the Starship Pinocet and play it over and over...
That looks like one of those whistling past the graveyard kinds of things. The temperature jumps from about 5000 (cornea) to a million (corona), and based on physics models it shouldn't be doing that. If low density were a factor, there wouldn't be any data to support the observation of the anomaly.
Agreed. Or with Billy the Mountain.
And Ray can pilot it. You've heard of him, Ray Ban. I went to school with his older brother. Both of them went into the USAF then the astronaut corps. They were unflappable, no matter what problems they faced, they just would roll on.
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