Why is the Suns chromosphere and corona hotter than the inner layers?
You would expect that the farther away you got from a hot body like the Sun, that the cooler the surrounding gases would become. The solar interior is a nuclear furnace at a core temperature near 15 million degrees. By the time you reach the solar surface, a region called the photosphere, the temperature has diminished to about 5700 degrees on the Kelvin scale. Then something peculiar happens. As you move away from the photosphere and enter the next outer layer called the chromosphere, the temperatures begin to climb to over 10,000 Kelvins, and by the time you enter the solar coronal regions some 300,000 kilometers above the photosphere, the temperature of the solar gases has climbed to over 1 million degrees! Although solar physicists do not fully understand the reasons behind this, they have some pretty good ideas. First, the gases in the outer layers of the Sun are ionized, a condition called a plasma. Plasmas, and charged particles, are easily influenced by magnetic fields, and the
