New Delhi, August 14, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
Data from India’s Aditya-L1 solar mission have provided fresh insights into one of the most enduring puzzles in solar physics — why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its visible surface and how it replenishes the enormous energy lost during solar eruptions.
The findings, reported by Indian researchers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, were led by Professor R. Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). The study examines processes that could help explain how the corona is heated and how its energy is restored following powerful eruptions.
The temperature structure of the Sun has long challenged scientists. While the Sun’s core reaches temperatures of nearly 15 million degrees Celsius, its visible surface, or photosphere, is around 5,500 degrees Celsius. Yet the corona, which lies much farther from the core, can reach about 2 million degrees Celsius and, during particularly intense events, temperatures of up to 40 million degrees Celsius.
This unexpectedly high temperature in the outer atmosphere, despite its greater distance from the Sun’s core, is known as the coronal heating problem and remains a major question in solar science.
The corona is also the region from which extreme space-weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) originate. These eruptions release huge quantities of energy and charged particles into space. While they can produce auroras on Earth, powerful events can also interfere with satellites, navigation systems, communications and power grids by triggering geomagnetic storms.
Prof. Ramesh noted that during periods of relatively low solar activity, the Sun typically produces two to three CMEs a day. During the peak of its approximately 11-year solar cycle, the number can rise to 10 or more eruptions daily.
The researchers’ observations are therefore significant in understanding how the corona maintains its extreme temperatures despite the continual loss of energy through such eruptions.
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