Thermalization Failure
I’ve been staring at a hole in the Sun. Not a literal hole, but a hole in the data. A place where the thermometer breaks.
Standard solar physics tells us the Sun’s atmosphere (the corona) is a fluid. A hot, soup-like gas where billions of particles collide, share energy, and settle into a nice, average temperature. A "Maxwellian" distribution. It’s a comforting idea. It means we can model the star like a steam engine.
We can use fluid dynamics. We can average everything out. But looking at the radio data from the last forty years, I think that’s a lie. I think the corona isn't a fluid. I think it’s a memory.
Thermalization is Forgetting
Let’s get physical for a second. What does it mean for a gas to have a "temperature"? It means the particles have collided with each other enough times that they’ve shared their energy equally. If a fast particle hits a slow one, they swap. Over time, the history of every individual particle is erased. The "fast" ones are dragged down, the "slow" ones are kicked up, and everyone settles into the average. That process (thermalization) is just a physical mechanism for forgetting. In a thermal system, the history of the violence that created the plasma is gone. The system has "forgotten" the explosion that birthed it and settled into equilibrium.
But what if you can’t collide? In the quiet corona, the density is incredibly low. A particle can fly for miles before it hits anything. The "Knudsen Number" (the ratio of mean free path to scale size) is high. This means the forgetting mechanism is broken. When a magnetic reconnection event kicks a particle to high speed, it stays fast. It doesn't collide. It doesn't thermalize. But it damn sure remembers the kick. This creates a "Kappa distribution" — a cold core of particles that are just chilling, and a massive "suprathermal tail" of high-speed screamers that refuse to calm down.
The Thermometer is a Lie
We measure the temperature of the Sun using two different tools.
Radio Waves: These interact mostly with the slow electrons (the Core).
UV/X-Rays: These interact mostly with the fast electrons (the Tail).
If the Sun were a fluid (Maxwellian), these two tools would give the same number. They don’t. In the Quiet Sun, the Radio says the temperature is 0.6 million degrees. The X-rays say it’s 1.5 million degrees. That’s a factor of 2.4. That’s a fundamental disagreement about reality. The standard model tries to fix this by saying "Oh, it's just instrument calibration" or "Maybe we're looking at different heights."
I don’t buy it.
I think the Radio is seeing the truth (the cold core), and the X-ray is seeing the lie (the hot tail). We’ve been calculating the energy budget of the entire star based on the tail, ignoring the fact that the bulk of the plasma is actually cold.
Active Region Collapse
If I’m right, we should see something weird happen when the density goes up. In a Sunspot (Active Region), the density is 100x higher. Suddenly, particles can collide. The "forgetting mechanism" turns back on. The high-speed tail should get crushed. The distribution should collapse back to a boring, average Maxwellian. And looking at old data from 1982, that seems to be exactly what happens. Over the high-density ring, the two thermometers agree. Over the low-density hole, they diverge wildly. The "structure" of the corona exists only where the "forgetting" fails.
The Scissorhands Pattern
Let me bust out the scissorhands logic because it gets weirder.
I started looking at Galaxy Clusters (structures millions of light years across). They have the same problem.
The X-ray temperature doesn’t match the "Sunyaev-Zel’dovich" temperature (pressure). In the outskirts of these clusters, where the gas is thin, the discrepancy is almost exactly a factor of (you guessed it) 2. Same math. Same "Knudsen number" threshold. Same thermalization failure.
The universe seems to have a rule (am I allowed to say this?): If you are sparse enough, you are allowed to be non-average. You are allowed to have a tail. You are allowed to be a Kappa. But if you get too dense (if you get crowded) the collisions force you to average out. You lose your tail. You thermalize. You forget.
The Human Equivalent
Sorry. I promised not to be philosophical in this section, but the math begs for it.
We build our societies on the Fluid Model. We want "stability." We want "equilibrium." We want everyone to be "civil." Civilization is just a high-collisionality environment. It is a machine designed to force thermalization. If you are too "hot" (too angry, too creative, and too radical), the system ensures you collide with enough norms, laws, and "best practices" until you regress to the mean. We delete the tails to maintain the temperature. Me doing all this stupid shit on my website is indeed The Research, and I am indeed an asshole for doing it. But systems don’t lie; people do.
So look at the Sun. The "interesting" part (the glowing halo that sustains the solar wind) only exists because it refuses to thermalize. It exists in the regime where the "Lie" of the average cannot be enforced.
What’s Next?
We thought the water was boiling, but we were just measuring the steam. I’m looking for the cold spots now. I’m looking for places where the composite noise hasn't drowned out the core's prime. Whether it’s in a sunspot or a society, the mechanism is the same: Reality is just the rate at which you are forced to forget.
So I guess we should stay non-thermal… which means:
Stay in motion.