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Science 6 October 2000:
Vol. 290. no. 5489, p. 41
DOI:

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Loops of fire are shining light on a solar mystery. Scientists have long wondered how the corona--the sun's wispy outer layer--can be 300 times hotter than the solar surface. Now NASA's TRACE spacecraft has taken high-resolution pictures of coronal loops, which are helping to narrow down plausible theories. Scientists had speculated that a chunk of plasma gets heated fairly uniformly as it shoots away from the sun, which implies that the loops of plasma are much hotter at the top than at the bottom. However, the pictures show that the gas apparently gets most of its energy near the sun's surface.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)