06-19-18 Goodfellow The Coronal Heating Problem

The Coronal Heating Problem is a Solar heat distribution disparity

that has dogged scientists for over forty years,

in that it it violates the Laws of Thermodynamics.

The Sun is considered to have a nuclear fusion furnace at its core producing temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius.

The photosphere of the Sun - that’s the visible Solar shell that you can see through welder’s goggles - is 5,500° Celsius.

The envelope or atmosphere surrounding the Sun is called the Corona, with a temperature of about 1 million °Celsius, to 10 million °Celsius.

These are some pretty large figures, and for many of us - including myself - it is not easy to grasp the relationship between these numbers, so I’ve created this little workaround.Imagine if we could scale down the temperature of the Sun so that the visible solar disk - the Sun’s Photosphere - was a mere 0° Celsius, the point at which water freezes.

Now, according to this adjusted solar model with the Sun’s shell at freezing point,

...the scaled down temperature in the core of the Sun in relation to the Photosphere temperature of 0° Celsius would go from 15 million° Celsius down to 2,700° Celsius - that’s still well past the melting point of steel.

And the Sun’s outer Coronal envelope?

Ranging from 1 million° Celsius At its lowest, 180° Celsius, at times reaching 1,800° Celsius. That’s a furious temperature range that varies between the melting point of lithium and platinum. Now think about that for a moment...

And sandwiched between these deadly inside and outside temperatures is a shell of snow at 0° Celsius

This is the coronal Heating Problem; According to the Laws of Thermodynamics, you can't pass heat from a cooler a hotter without first heating up the cooler domain. So unless some extraordinary solution is found to this problem, it makes it exceedingly hard for a Hydrogen-Fusion furnace to exist within the Sun.

To compound the problem even further, the Photosphere produces Sunspots...

These are depressions in the Photosphere, which are darker and cooler, not brighter and hotter; the exact opposite of what one might expect from a Sun with a exceedingly hot Hydrogen-Fusion Core.

So, pulling it together, this is what we can directly observe of the Sun and gather data from:

...And going inwards towards the Sun, this is the contemporary theory as to how it works:

Finally, a recent time-lapse of strange Sunspot behavior.

As is true with much else in this wondrous Universe, every observation we manage to tease forth with our tools and logic, we are compelled with the insatiable need beg a further plethora of questions, some of which we don't even know how formulate, except perhaps for... What the hell is THAT!?

Thanks for reading and watching! Stephen Goodfellow