The DRUMS explanation of the coronal heating paradox is that the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, becomes extremely hot not because it is simply receiving heat from below, but because it is actively interacting with a structured background property of space.
In this view, space is not empty. It contains an underlying substrate that has structure and variation across different regions. The solar atmosphere moves through this structured environment as plasma flows outward from the Sun.
The corona is made of highly conductive, fast-moving plasma. As this plasma moves through regions where the structure of space changes, it does not just passively drift. Instead, its motion interacts with those spatial variations in a way that transfers energy into the plasma itself.
This means the heating is not explained purely as energy traveling upward from the Sun’s surface. Instead, energy is treated as being locally converted in the corona from the interaction between moving plasma and the structure of space.
Because the plasma is moving rapidly and the coronal region is highly dynamic and extended, these interactions are especially strong there. That is why the corona becomes much hotter than the surface below it, even though it is farther from the Sun’s core.
In this framework, the corona functions as a boundary region where motion through structured space continuously feeds energy into the plasma, raising its temperature to extreme levels.
The result is that the million-degree temperatures of the corona are not treated as a contradiction, but as a natural outcome of continuous local energy conversion occurring in the outer solar atmosphere.