Coronal heating & solar wind, returns from solar missions shed light on Sun's mysteries - NASASpaceflight.com

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The problem of seeing this region of the Sun is dwindling, not just because of new missions such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and European Space Agency’s/NASA’s Solar Orbiter. 

Eugene Parker, for whom the Parker Solar Probe is named.  He proposed that nanoflares, tiny eruptions on the Sun’s surface that are one-billionth the size of a normal solar flare, cause the corona to heat up to its observed temperatures. 

That led them to the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), data from which was able to confirm that just 20 seconds after the nanoflare was observed, a sudden-heating of the corona by multi millions of degrees occurred directly above

Meanwhile, solar physicists focusing on other dynamics of the corona have also used NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to more deeply explore the structures that create the ever-present flow of charged particles — called the solar wind — outward from the Sun to distances well beyond 100 astronomical units (AU)

Changes to the solar wind can have profound impacts on Earth and our technology.  The 1859 Carrington Event, in which the most severe Coronal Mass Ejection ever recorded directly struck Earth just 17.6 hours after erupting from the corona, is an example of how a lack of solar wind can accelerate the impact timing of potentially disastrous solar storms

Like Coronal Mass Ejections, it is from the corona which the solar wind is expelled at velocities that allow it to escape the gravitational pull of the star and stream outward in all directions

Those interactions could be key to understanding one of the major driving forces behind disruptions in the solar wind and could potentially connect to one of the first observations made by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe in November 2018 when it found sudden reversals in the magnetic field direction of the solar wind. 

Understanding the solar corona and its complex dynamics is, in part, key to understanding how to better predict the fluctuations and electromagnetic tantrums our host star can sometimes experience