Tag: Kelvin

Heating the solar corona

The hot outer layer of the sun, the corona, has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin, much more than the surface temperature of the Sun which is only about 5500 degrees Kelvin. Moreover, the corona is very active and ejects a wind of charged particles at a rate equivalent to about one-millionth of the moon’s mass each year. Some…

The habitability of Titan and its ocean

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a hotbed of organic molecules, harboring a soup of complex hydrocarbons similar to that thought to have existed over four billion years ago on the primordial Earth. Titan’s surface, however, is in a deep freeze at –179 degrees Celsius (–290 degrees Fahrenheit, or 94 kelvin). Life as we know it cannot exist on the moon’s frigid…

Clouds that look like ocean waves

They’re called Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds, aka billow clouds or shear-gravity clouds, and they look like breaking ocean waves. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/kelvin-helmholzt-clouds…