For a new study, a team of physicists recruited roughly 1,000 undergraduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder to help answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun: How does the star’s outermost atmosphere, or “corona,” get so hot?
The research represents a nearly-unprecedented feat of data analysis: From 2020 to 2022, the small army of mostly first- and second-year students examined the physics of more than 600 real solar flares—gigantic eruptions of energy from the sun’s roiling corona.
The researchers, including 995 undergraduate and graduate students, published their finding in The Astrophysical Journal. The results suggest that solar flares may not be responsible for superheating the sun’s corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests.
“We...
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