There is More Than Just One “Corona” That Can Kill Us All

Abstract

When most people hear the phrase "space exploration", they imagine preparing the colonisation of Mars, studying distant planets, searching for alien life or studying exotic black holes. Many times, however, mankind tends to leap before looking and focus on the exotic and the interesting instead of that which might not seem that special to most of us, but which which can be crucial for our survival. This way, many major and important issues in astrophysics - and sciences in general - can become overlooked and take very long to resolve. One such major issue in astrophysics is the behaviour of our closest star, the Sun. While we generally assume that we have a good idea about the most significant processes in the solar interior acting as its main energy source, our attempts at explaining the dynamics and structure of the solar atmosphere (the so-called corona) are still merely an educated guesswork at best. Due to several of the magnetohydrodynamic processes which we do not yet fully understand, the temperature of the solar atmosphere is very high compared to the layers underneath and reaches millions of Kelvins. Since this is where the major mass ejections occur, some of which might be directed towards the Earth causing geomagnetic storms, it is crucial that we start not only to fully understand these processes, but also to be able to accurately predict their outcomes. As will be shown in this text however, it is not only our limited understanding of the physics which prevents us from doing that; it is also the lack of computational resources. This paper firstly briefly discusses the basic physics behind the behaviour of the solar coronal plasma. Afterwards, it discusses the coronal heating problem in more detail and finally, it outlines the major challenges we currently face which seem to prevent us from efficient simulation and complete understanding of the behaviour of our closest star.