Space: Flowing carpets keep Sun warm
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A 55-year-old mystery about the temperature of the Sun's corona - the outermost layer, visible during a solar eclipse - has been solved by a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft. The answer, it turns out, is that the Sun is covered in carpets.
They are not physical carpets. Instead, they consist of moving waves of magnetism which carry more energy than a hydroelectric plant could generate in a million years.
For years, scientists have known that the corona has a temperature of millions of degrees. Yet the visible surface of the Sun is relatively cold, at about 6,000 degrees centigrade.
Since it is physically impossible in a closed system for thermal energy to be transferred from the cool surface to the hotter one, scientists have long theorised that some form of electromagnetic activity was causing the necessary energy movement.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (Soho) spacecraft, run by ESA and the US space agency Nasa, has discovered that there are huge "carpets" consisting of loops of charged (and hence magnetic) particles flowing across the Sun's surface.
Where the carpets meet they produce "short circuits" which flow upwards into the corona and heat it to its multi-million degree temperature. Images collected by Soho show the hot gases of the corona reacting as the shifting magnetic fields on the surface move and develop.
"We found that after a typical small magnetic loop emerged, it fragments and drifts around and then disappears in only 40 hours," said Alan Title of the Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research in Palo Alto, California.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments