Astronomers find clues to decades-long coronal heating mystery
Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - 11:30
in Astronomy & Space
Drs. Michael Hahn and Daniel Wolf Savin, research scientists at Columbia University's Astrophysics Laboratory in New York, NY, found evidence that magnetic waves in a polar coronal hole contain enough energy to heat the corona and deposit most of their energy at sufficiently low heights for the heat to spread throughout the corona. The observations help to answer a 60-year-old solar physics conundrum about the unexplained extreme temperature of the Sun's corona—known as the coronal heating problem.