SOLAR physicists have puzzled for years over why the Sun’s atmosphere is so
much hotter than its surface. Now a team of researchers believe they’ve
discovered where the heat comes from even if they don’t know what generates it.
The atmosphere heats from the bottom up.
From measurements made with NASA’s Transition Region and Coronal Explorer
(TRACE) spacecraft, the team concluded that heat is generated in the bottom
layer of the Sun’s atmosphere and not uniformly throughout it, as scientists
previously thought. This insight should help explain why temperatures in the
outer layers, known as the corona, soar to millions…
