Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey, brain Stuff, learn volga about here. One of the weird things about space is that things don't always conform to what would seem like common sense. Take the Sun, for example. You think that the Sun's surface would be hotter than its outer atmosphere since the surface is closer to the nuclear furnace at the Sun's core. After all, when you're sitting in front of a fireplace, it feels hotter when you get closer to it. Right. The problem is the
Sun doesn't work that way. Let's talk about the structure of the Sun. It is composed of plasma. It has no solid surface. However, it still has a defined structure. The innermost part of the Sun is called the core.
This is where gravity causes enough pressure to create the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms, creating atoms of helium, plus a burst of energy that's emitted as various forms of electromagnetic radiation of everything from ultraviolet light and X rays too visible and infrared light, to microwaves and radio waves. That energy slowly moves out through two layers that surround the core, called the radiative zone and the convective zone.
Until the energy hits the photosphere, which is the part of the Sun that we can see, and that's often referred to as the surface of the Sun. Above that, you've got a couple layers of atmosphere, first the chromosphere and then the corona. Now, the weird thing that we're talking about today is that as you progress from the core through to the photosphere, the layers of the sun get colder, but then as you go through the outer atmospheric layers they get hotter. Again. Of course, this is
all relative. The photosphere is indeed pretty hot, between six thousand, seven hundred and eleven thousand degrees fahrenheit, which is some three thousand, seven hundred to six thousand, two hundred degrees elseus, which is hot. But the further you get from the
Sun's surface, the hotter the atmosphere seems to get. The temperature more than doubles through the chromosphere, and at the corona, which is about one thousand, two hundred miles or two thousand one kilometers from the surface, its soars to an astonishing nine hundred thousand degrees fahrenheit or five hundred thousand degrees celsius. Besides the Sun, some other stars also exhibit this curious pattern, and for a long time, scientists struggled
to figure out why. They developed a hypothesis that magneto hydrodynamic waves distribute energy from below the photosphere directly up to the corona, almost like an express train with no local stops. Magneto hydrodynamics combines the studies of magnetic fields and fluids that conduct electricity. The plasma that makes up the Sun is an extreme example of such a fluid.
In British researchers used advances and imaging technology to investigate the Sun's chromosphere, that layer in between the photosphere and the corona and actually examine some of these magneto hydrodynamic waves. Their calculations confirmed that the waves could be responsible for
transporting energy to the corona and heating that layer. Richard Morton, a scientist for the UK's Northumbria University, explained when announcing the discovery quote, our observations have permitted us to estimate the amount of energy transported by the magnetic waves, and these estimates reveal that the waves energy meets the energy requirement for the unexplained temperature increase in the corona. Today's
episode is based on the article weird physics. The closer you get to the Sun, the cooler it gets on how stuff works dot Com, written by Patrick J. Tiger. Brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio impart partnership with how stuff Works dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Playing and Ramsay Young. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.