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The Sun's Corona

You might hear on TV that lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun. Lightning is about 30,000 K compared to the sun's photosphere temperature of 5000 K. However, to get to the photosphere you would have to pass through the unusually hot corona whose temperature is almost 15,000,000 K. This is 500 times the temperature of lightning. Now that is shocking!

Imagine the Universe is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), Dr. Nicholas White (Director), within the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Project Leader: Dr. Jim Lochner
All material on this site has been created and updated between 1997-2004.

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