The ancient Greeks were lying! Sort of…
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
As you get closer to the sun it gets hotter, right? Wrong! The sun’s SURFACE is much cooler than the region slightly deeper called the corona.
Daniele Telloni at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics looked into this. When three spacecraft were carefully positioned around the sun, it verified what physicists suspected.
The corona heats up a bit like boiling water heating a pot. In boiling water, random movements turn energy into heat. Around the sun, hot gases move through magnetic fields, turning magnetic energy into heat!
See? If Icarus had flown even closer to the sun, he… MIGHT have been… alright?
Reference: Daniele Telloni et al. Coronal Heating Rate in the Slow Solar Wind. IOPScience (2023). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ace112