Few would be surprised to learn that the sun is very, very hot. At its surface, the temperature is several thousand degrees Celsius.
But you might think that, like a fire, the temperature drops as you move away from the surface. In fact, way out in the sun’s corona (the outermost part of its atmosphere) the temperature rises swiftly – to several million degrees.
The reason is a mystery, but now some scientists believe they’re on the verge of finding out.
Dr Sven Wedemeyer of the University of Oslo in Norway is one such scientist. He is working on a project called SolarALMA, funded by the EU’s European Research Council (ERC) to analyse groundbreaking data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an expansive radio observatory in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. […]
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