Solar Corona Heating by the Axion Quark Nugget Dark Matter

Understand

In this work we advocate for the idea that two seemingly unrelated 80-year-old mysteries - the nature of dark matter and the high temperature of the million degree solar corona - may have resolutions that lie within the same physical framework.

• The current paradigm is that the corona is heated by nanoflares, which were originally proposed as miniature versions of the observed solar flares.
• It was recently suggested that the nanoflares could be identified as annihilation events of the nuggets from the Axion Quark Nugget (AQN) dark matter model.
• This model was invented as an explanation of the observed ratio $\Omega_{\rm dark} \sim \Omega_{\rm visible}$, based only on cosmological and particle physics considerations.