ABSTRACT
For quite some time, solar physicists have been wondering about the temperature difference between the Sun’s apparent surface photosphere of the relatively low temperature of about 6000° K and the CORONAS temperature of a few million degrees. The laws of thermodynamics appear to rule out that the photosphere should be able to heat the corona to a temperature of several hundred times its own. Various plasma processes have been proposed from time to time, which would enable charged particles in the photosphere to accelerate causing high temperatures. However, all these processes cannot explain how unordered thermal energy particles should be transformed into ordered high-energy particles. In the coronal heating, apparently it has not been recognized that a temperature of few million degrees is the natural temperature of the solar plasma, whereas the photospheric temperature is the abnormal one. The coronal heating can be interpreted in a straightforward way by basic plasma kinetic and atomic processes. Plasma was first detected and described by William Crookes in 1879 [1]. The Crookes glass tube [2] was further identified and significantly improved by Thomson in 1897 [3]. Subsequently, the term plasma was used by Langmuir in 1928 [4], owing to the glowing discharge that molds itself to the shape of the Crookes tube [5].
