Coronal Heating Solar Mystery

The Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere that extends millions of kilometers into space, reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Kelvin, far hotter than the visible surface below it, which sits around 5,500°C. This defies the normal expectation that heat should drop as you move away from the core of a star. Scientists have studied this “coronal heating problem” for decades and have proposed mechanisms like magnetic reconnection and wave heating. But no single explanation has fully solved why the corona becomes so intensely hot.

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