Once again, file under: "SCIENCE: We don't know what we don't know"
The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined
"we were so spectacularly wrong"
The sun radiates far more high-frequency light than expected, raising questions about unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field and the possibility of even more exotic physics.
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“It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well: the sun,” said Brian Fields, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
A decade’s worth of telescope observations of the sun have revealed a startling mystery: Gamma rays, the highest frequency waves of light, radiate from our nearest star seven times more abundantly than expected. Stranger still, despite this extreme excess of gamma rays overall, a narrow bandwidth of frequencies is curiously absent.
“It’s amazing that we were so spectacularly wrong about something we should understand really well:THE SUN!”
Edited by Rogerdodger, 21 June 2021 - 04:12 PM.
