Type:		Electronic Citation
Title:		Gravitational Energy of the Sun explains "Coronal Heating"
Author(s):		Smid, T.
Date:		2010
Abstract:		The fact that the solar corona has a temperature of a few million degrees has puzzled solar physicists for a long time, considering the comparatively low temperature of about 6000oK at the sun's apparent surface (the photosphere). Clearly, the laws of thermodynamics seem to rule out that a cool gas volume (the photosphere) should be able to heat another gas volume (the corona) to a temperature of several hundred times its own. Various elaborate plasma processes have been proposed that would enable charged particles in the photosphere to be accelerated to such high temperatures, but all these can still not explain how unordered thermal energy of many particles should be transformed into ordered high energy of a few particles. However, in the course of the 'coronal heating' discussion it has apparently not been recognized that a temperature of several million degrees is in fact the 'natural' temperature of the solar plasma, whereas the photospheric temperature is the 'abnormal' one. In the following, these circumstances are examined in more detail and it will become clear that the 'coronal heating' can be explained in a straightforward way by basic plasma kinetic and atomic processes.
Link:		http://www.plasmaphysics.org.uk/research/sun.htm