How can the empty space around the sun be millions of degrees hot and the surface only thousands ? it doesn’t make any sense.
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Why do they “say” it’s hotter than the surface?
Because all measurements of temperature show that it is far hotter than the ‘surface’ layer. This is a piece of data, and evidence that stands on it’s own. It needs no explanation to be true. It doesn’t need to ‘make sense’ for it is a measured, observable fact.
That phrasing aside, you have identified a currently unsettled question in Astronomy. We don’t really know, exactly, why it’s hotter.
It isn’t empty, it’s full of hydrogen and helium zipping around at high speeds. That’s why it has a temperature. But it doesn’t fit the simple model of things get cooler as you get further from the heat source (the core fusion). That’s how the rest of the sun seems to work, so it is a very big puzzle.
But the sparse plasma of the corona behaves a bit differently than the rest of the sun. Magnetic fields are more free to move through it for example, compared to the dense solar ‘surface’.
So waves in the magnetic field is one model they’re working with.
Another is interactions with solar flares, or even ‘nano-flares’ that serve as a way to introduce heat into the corona and crank the temperature up.
That said, the total energy in the hot corona is still far far lower than the energy in the surface of the sun, so we’re still obeying conservation laws.
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