Seeking the Sun’s Achilles’ Heels

Homer’s Achilles was endowed with seeming immortality, his mother Thetis dipping her baby son into the River Styx in an attempt to make him invulnerable, for it had been foretold that he was to die young. Although the greatest warrior-king, he was not quite perfection—the legends tell of Thesis’ finger and thumb covering Achilles’ heel from the protective power of the water. While not “spontaneous”, his death was nevertheless inevitable owing to just this small imperfection. We might consider the solar corona’s imperfection in the same light, its very invulnerability leading to its demise, it cannot escape heating once magnetism is a component of the physics of the sun-as-a-star. Unlike Homer’s story, our Trojan war is still incomplete. The purpose of the current chapter is to find some unprotected weakness, exploiting not an arrow, but both our understanding of plasma physics and observational capabilities to find the Sun’s own weaknesses leading us along that road to imperfection, and heating. So, out of the rich, chaotic and still-to-be-refuted ideas reviewed thus far, we embark on a brief odyssey. This will naturally entail subjective detective work. Subjectivity in a short book devoted to a long-unsolved problem is unavoidable. But it will surely be an interesting odyssey given the many challenges discussed in Chap. 3 .