Physicists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have done some important work to further illuminate the extreme heat of the sun’s corona. According to their findings published in “Why does the Sun’s Corona sizzle at one million degrees Fahrenheit?” (ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 May 2018), the corona may be even hotter than previously thought, making a strange phenomenon even stranger. Fully understanding the flow of energy between the surface and corona will go a long way toward solving this puzzle. As I describe in The Substance of Spacetime, the flow itself, moving at relativistic velocity, may be the solution.
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 Substance, temperature is defined as the pressure of spacetime. It would appear, therefore, that the pressure of the sun’s surface is, for some strange reason, considerably lower than the pressure of the corona, some distance away. This question, then, must focus on the mechanism that is driving up the pressure of the corona.
Posed in this way, the answer suggests itself: The corona is actually the innermost termination shock of the solar wind—analogous to, but much more intense than, the termination shock just inside the Kuiper Belt—marking the radius at which it slams into the relatively slow-moving spacetime immediately beyond the sun’s surface. 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. 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.
When a spacetime flow of any origin pushes against the cosmos (in the form of the vacuum pressure), the cosmos pushes back with an equal and opposite force. 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. 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.
Excerpted from Substance of Spacetime, Chapter 11: Cosmology, Section: Coronal Heating Problem