The C-PhLARE Project: One Thousand Students vs. the Paradox of the Sun
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Abstract: It is likely both intuitive and familiar that, as you walk further from a campfire, you feel less of its heat. And yet the same is not true for the great fireball in the sky: our sun. In fact, the Sun’s corona is millions of kelvin hotter than its photosphere, despite being much further away from the center of the star. From 2020 through 2021 a team of over a thousand undergraduate students at CU Boulder painstakingly analyzed the X-ray emissions of hundreds of individual solar flares in search of evidence to help resolve this mystery.