While society-disrupting flares are an extreme example, researchers hope that if they can better understand how energy gets into the corona, then we might be able to predict dangerous eruptions with enough warning to protect vital equipment. вЂњAs we become more of a space-based culture, understanding the Sun and how it interacts with the Earth is even more important.вЂќ вЂњWeвЂ™re very connected to these problems, even though itвЂ™s not necessarily something thatвЂ™s going to change your life today,вЂќ says Amy Winebarger, an astrophysicist at NASAвЂ™s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The largest flares from the corona can wreak havoc with power grids, wireless communication and satellites. That energy often affects Earth, with occasionally disastrous results. And perhaps most baffling of all, the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the SunвЂ™s surface.ДЇiguring out how this excess energy gets into the corona isnвЂ™t just an academic exercise. Some particles shoot out of the corona with so much energy that they approach the speed of light. The solar wind doesnвЂ™t slow down as it leaves the Sun - it speeds up. Events in the corona affect all of the SunвЂ™s worlds, including Earth and the technological society that humans have built upon it.ДЄnd yet, despite roughly 80 years of study, much about the corona remains a mystery. Composed mostly of electrons and the bare nuclei of hydrogen and helium atoms, it is the launchpad for the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that escape the corona and wash over the planets, eventually petering out at the threshold to interstellar space. That glow is the solar corona, the SunвЂ™s tenuous upper atmosphere of ionized gas. Daytime morphs into a 360-degree dusk, and where the Sun once hung a black hole punches through the sky, wreathed by a white ethereal glow.

In the final moments before a total solar eclipse, the temperature drops, birds and insects sing, and the ambient light becomes otherworldly.

Sun corona temperature in celsius