Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
Astronomy from High School Students The Phenomenal Sun
Takeru Suzuki (Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)
| Astronomy from High School Students "The Phenomenal Sun" by Ken Suzuki How do solar winds and flares occur? |
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Nippon Hyoronsha (2020) |
This book was released in April 2020, just as the full online lectures were beginning. Three and a half years have passed since then, and the word "Corona" has become the first thing people associate with viruses, but "Taiyo Corona" used to be the word associated with Toyota cars. However, "solar corona" used to be a word associated with Toyota's car models.
The solar corona is a layer of plasma in the upper atmosphere of the sun with temperatures exceeding 1 million degrees Celsius, from which the solar wind blows out, and what travels around and reaches the earth can cause auroras. This book deals with the solar corona and solar wind, which have been the subject of my research since my graduate school days.
The surface of the sun is called a photosphere, and its absolute temperature is a little less than 6,000 degrees Celsius. The sun's main heat source is the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs near its center, so the high-temperature corona above the "low-temperature" photosphere increases in temperature as it moves away from the heat source, which means that it is in a state of "wonder," which contradicts the direction of heat flow.
This book uses magnetohydrodynamics to explain why this is the case. Magnetohydrodynamics is a combination of fluid mechanics and electromagnetics, which I have covered in a graduate course in the Department of Astronomy, but this book attempts to explain magnetohydrodynamics without using equations, which is in keeping with the title of the book, "Astronomy for High School Students. In various book reviews, comments such as "It is indeed impossible for high school students..." were made. However, I would like to interpret it conveniently as a level just right for the university (graduate school) students who read this Faculty of Science News.
Published in the January 2024 issue of The Rigaku-bu News