Presented at CSNSS'03.

Motto: "The purpose of life is the investigation of the Sun, the Moon, and the heavens." - Anaxagoras, 459 BC

SUMMARY

One of the basic questions of solar research is the nature of the Sun. We show here how the plasma nature of the Sun leads to the self-generation of solar activity. The release of magnetic, rotational, gravitational, nuclear energies and that of the gravity mode oscillations deviate from uniformity and spherical symmetry. Through instabilities they lead to the emergence of sporadic and localized regions like flux tubes, electric filaments, magnetic elements and high temperature regions. A systematic approach exploring the solar collective degrees of freedom, extending to ordering phenomena of the magnetic features related to Higgs fields, is presented.

Handling solar activity as transformations of energies from one form to another one presents a picture on the network of the energy levels of the Sun, showing that the Sun is neither a mere "ball of gas" nor a "quiescent steady-state fusion-reactor machine", but a complex self-organizing system. Since complex self-organizing systems are similar to living systems (and, by some opinion, identical with them), we also consider what arguments indicate the living nature of the Sun. Thermodynamic characteristics of the inequilibrium Sun are found important in this respect and numerical estimations of free energy rate densities and specific exergies are derived.

KEY WORDS

solar physics, degrees of freedom, self-organizing complex systems, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, astrobiology

CLASSIFICATION