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I think your ides is on the right track, however the precipitation cycle on Earth has something not seen in the sun, the heat of evaporation...but maybe there's an equivalent of that in another form.
crzayfool
I'm just going to fire this out there before I continue reading the rest of this thread and the replies... Applying logic here I cannot find anything "special" about why the corona would be hotter.
"Wouldn't it stand to reason that if the surface of the Sun is hot and constantly "erupting" in an attempt to break free from the immense gravity holding it down. The act of the upper atmosphere being sandwiched in place by these two opposing forces (eruptions pushing out and gravity pulling down) would cause it to become super heated over time until which point (CME's) coronal mass ejections occur; when the fight between pressure/heat overcomes the immense gravity of the Sun holding it back?".
It's the same as the precipitation cycle on Earth - just this time gravity doesn't win... the molten rain doesn't fall back down it gets blasted out into the solar system.
Does this make sense. Could it really be as simple as normal?
Sounds like a description for a Crookes tube or a cathode ray tube. Could the Sun be compared to a cathode ray tube, the Sun being one electrode and the heliopause being the other?
Take a fixed volume of space and fill it with a homogenous mixture of protons and electrons, same number of each. Apply an E-field going from the left side to the right side. The left side is positively charged, the right side is negatively charged.
This seems counterintuitive at first yet comparing it to a cathode ray tube…? Anyone have any comments on this?
The vectors point inward, toward the center of the sun…Energy from the outside environment of the sun is flowing across an imaginary thermodynamic boundary that surrounds the sun, INTO the sun.
How does that work? They measure a change Before the flare happens. I assume they mean before the flare erupts (or is observed erupting) and not the time it takes material from the eruption to reach Earth, which takes a day or two.
On Dec 13, 2006…when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54…noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.
The observation is a change in the radioactive decay rate (something that was thought to be constant) that is somehow caused by a solar flare before the flare erupts.
The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.
What could be happening 39 hours before a solar flare erupts that would alter the decay rates of radioactive elements? The emission of neutrinos?
Jenkins, monitoring a detector in his lab in 2006, discovered that the decay rate of a radioactive sample changed slightly beginning 39 hours before a large solar flare.
I like that quote.
"Since neutrinos have essentially no mass or charge, the idea that they could be interacting with anything is foreign to physics," Jenkins said. "So, we are saying something that doesn't interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed. Either neutrinos are affecting decay rate or perhaps an unknown particle is."
Since I made this thread in 2011, in 2015 some researchers have modeled the surface of the sun like boiling plasma, generating currents and magnetic fields which rise above the surface and drive various mechanisms which result in the temperature profile of the sun.
originally posted by: arationofreasonl
Interesting satelite image data. Are these million degree 'spicules' originating in the 5,000 degree surface?
So it's not just the spicules at work, the researchers think it's all those phenomena described, including the spicules.
The Sun's temperature, which reaches around 15 million degrees Celsius in its core, steadily decreases with distance from the core, falling to 6000°C at its 'surface'. Logically, it should therefore continue to decline in the atmosphere. Instead, it rises to about 10,000°C in the chromosphere, and exceeds a million degrees Celsius in the corona. So what source of energy can heat the atmosphere and maintain it at such high temperatures?...
The researchers observed that the thin layer under the Sun's surface actually behaves rather like a shallow pan containing boiling plasma, heated from below and forming 'bubbles' associated with granules. This boiling plasma soup generates a dynamo process that amplifies and maintains the magnetic field. As the field emerges from the surface, it takes on a salt-and-pepper appearance, forming concentrations dubbed 'mesospots' that are larger, fewer in number and more persistent, all of which is consistent with observations.
The scientists also discovered that a structure resembling a mangrove forest appears around the solar mesospots: tangled 'chromospheric roots' dive into the spaces between the granules, surrounding 'magnetic tree trunks' that rise up towards the corona and are associated with the larger-scale magnetic field.
"Figure: Complete model showing the shallow pan of boiling plasma, near the solar surface, that generates the 'salt-and-pepper' magnetic field at the surface (blue/red). As the field emerges it creates a structure resembling a mangrove forest, which heats the various layers of the solar atmosphere."
The researchers' calculations show that, in the chromosphere, heating of the atmosphere results from multiple micro-eruptions in the mangrove roots that carry intense electric current, in pace with the 'bubbles' from the boiling plasma. They also discovered that larger but less numerous eruptive events take place in the neighborhood of the mesospots, although these are not able to heat the upper corona on a larger scale.
This eruptive process generates 'magnetic' waves along the tree trunks, rather like sound traveling along a plucked string. These waves then transport energy to the upper corona, which is heated by their progressive dissipation. The scientists' calculations also show that as the ejected matter falls back towards the surface it forms tornadoes, which have actually been observed. Thin plasma jets near the tree trunks are also produced and are associated with recently discovered spicules. All these phenomena, which have been ascertained individually but not explained, make up various energy channels produced by the boiling plasma, rather than the single source hitherto postulated.