Problem: Why is the Sun’s corona (atmosphere layer) so much hotter than the Sun’s surface?
Coronal heating is a fascinating phenomenon that refers to the extreme difference in temperature between the sun’s surface (~5800 K) and its corona (1–3 million K), located anywhere from a few dozen to a hundred or so kilometers above the surface. The obvious challenge here is to explain how a region outside of the Sun can be so much hotter than the Sun itself. Theoretically, radiative heating would require the surface to be hotter than the corona because heat transported by electromagnetic radiation dissipates according to the inverse square law. There is no generally understood mechanism that violates this thermodynamic principle, and certainly not to such an extreme degree. According to the theory in this book, temperature is defined as the pressure of spacetime. Therefore, it would appear that the pressure of the sun’s surface is, for some strange reason, considerably lower than the pressure of the corona, some distance away. The question, then, must focus on the mechanism that is driving up the pressure of the corona.
Posed in this way, the answer is fairly straightforward: The corona is actually a termination shock of the solar wind, marking a radius at which it slams into the relatively slow-moving spacetime immediately beyond the sun’s surface. Though simple in principle, the specifics of this phenomenon are greatly complicated by the sun’s rotation, which tends to stretch, twist, and compress the wind toward the poles and equator in the manner described in Chapter 4. However, this added complexity does not fundamentally alter the theory behind the phenomenon.
Given the extreme heat of the corona, the solar wind, upon exiting the sun’s surface, must be moving at a relativistic velocity, far greater than its merely supersonic velocity out beyond the corona. Under any of the current physical theories, it would not be possible to entertain such a notion, because a spacetime flow of that intensity—exceeding even the high escape velocity of the sun—would sweep up solar matter from the upper mantle at a prodigious rate and quickly transport our star piecemeal out into space leaving nothing behind. So, if the corona is a relativistic termination shock, there must be a component of this phenomenon that prevents the Sun from tearing itself apart.
As always, when a spacetime flow pushes against the cosmos (in the form of the vacuum pressure), the cosmos pushes back with an equal and opposite force. As described in Chapter 4, black holes are prevented from exploding like miniature big bangs by the steady resistance of spacetime at its equilibrium pressure way out at the black hole’s termination shock. If we assume for a moment that the solar wind exits the Sun with a relativistic velocity, we can then also assume that the ambient spacetime immediately surrounding the Sun pushes back against it with an extraordinary counterforce. This collision is responsible for the extreme high temperature of the corona. When the solar wind hits the coronal termination shock, it creates something akin to an atom’s electronic shell. The pressure on that shell pushes up against the cosmos (in the form of the slower, supersonic solar wind), but also pushes back down against the surface, holding the Sun together and preventing the sun’s mantle matter from being swept out into deep space.
Besides explaining the coronal heating problem, this hypothesis has some other interesting consequences. It implies that there are at least four—and possibly five—important gravitational zones inside and outside the sun.
- The neutrogenic shell, which transforms protons into neutrons, liberates spacetime and creates the innermost gravitational gradient, the one that holds the sun’s mantle in place and compresses the core, stabilizing its neutrons.
- The coronal shell, which, by decelerating the relativistic flow of spacetime, achieves a very high temperature and pressure. This means, surprisingly, that the gravitational force of the sun, measured anywhere between the corona and the traditional termination shock, issues from the corona and not directly from the neutrogenic shell or anything else inside the star.
- The traditional termination shock, described in Chapter 4, which is located approximately 70–90 astronomical units from the sun, and is gravitationally implicated in the distribution of matter in the Kuiper Belt.
- An extremely distant and hypothetical final termination shock, that would be gravitationally implicated in some way with the distribution of matter in the Oort Cloud.
- The very indirect and tiny effect of the sun’s liberated spacetime, spun off the disk of the Milky Way, on the cosmological equilibrium of the entire galaxy.
We have seen repeatedly how difficult it is to extrapolate the mass of a stellar object directly from its gravitational force. For example, neutron stars appear to become denser as they become smaller because their gravitational fields issue from their surfaces and the ratio of surface area to volume increases as a neutron star shrinks. Indeed, in view of this theory, it now appears that typical atomic matter is actually anomalous, the only known configuration of matter that does not generate its gravitational field primarily on its surface, but throughout its entire extent. That means it is not possible to accurately compare the masses of, for example, the Earth and Sun by simply comparing their relative gravitational field strengths. Because the sun’s gravitational field is generated in large part by the extreme force that results from the liberation of spacetime from protons, and not directly from the total number of hadrons of which the Sun is composed, the mass of the Sun (measured in hadrons rather than kilograms) is actually far lower than is currently believed. The Earth’s gravitational energy comes from the physical/mechanical convection of its innumerable protons and neutrons, whereas the sun’s gravitational energy comes primarily from the transformation of mass into energy (high-pressure spacetime) through neutrogenesis. The latter process is far more energetic, per unit of mass. That is, it has a far higher gravitational energy-to-mass ratio than nucleonic convection. However, this higher gravitational energy should not be attributed to a greater quantity of matter, but rather to the completely different manner in which that energy is generated. Therefore, the Sun has considerably less intrinsic mass than it appears to have when its ratio of mass to gravity is assumed to be identical to Earth’s (or any other sample of standard non-stellar atomic matter).
In Chapter 2, I discussed the relationship between the cosmological constant and the pressure responsible for uniform neutron creation on the neutrogenic shell. Briefly, the vacuum exerts itself at the termination shock, pushing back against the solar wind. Because this counterforce is based on the equilibrium pressure of spacetime (the cosmological constant), the outward force of all neutrogenic shells in all stars must exert the same pressure per unit of surface area. The pressure on this shell is responsible for causing a very specific number of partons to migrate out of a proton, resulting in perfectly uniform neutrons everywhere in the universe. However, it would now appear that the termination shock way out in the Kuiper Belt is only indirectly responsible, while the coronal termination shock is directly responsible for the pressure on the neutrogenic shell. We might even speculate that the Oort Cloud termination shock (if it exists) also plays a role, being more directly in contact with the true interstellar vacuum pressure. In fact, all of this may be true, and it certainly adds complexity to the theory. But ultimately it does not change anything; it is still the cosmological constant that drives the whole system. The pressure with which any of these termination shocks pushes back against the solar wind that creates it is dictated by the pressure between itself and the next farthest one out. Ultimately, this daisy chain of termination shocks is still dictated by the vacuum pressure of interstellar space, and the uniformity of both neutrogenic shells and the neutrons created thereon is still dictated by the cosmological constant, just not in a simple one-step process.
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