Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011spd....42.2103v&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #42, #21.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
It seems largely agreed that many coronal loops---those observed at a temperature of about 1 MK---are bundles of unresolved strands that are heated by storms of impulsive nanoflares. The nature of coronal heating in hotter loops and in the very important but largely ignored diffuse component of active regions is much less clear. Are these regions also heated impulsively, or is the heating quasi steady? The spectacular new data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) telescopes on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) offer an excellent opportunity to address this question. We analyze the light curves of coronal loops and the diffuse corona in 6 different AIA channels and compare them with the predicted light curves from theoretical models. Light curves in the different AIA channels reach their peak intensities with predictable orderings as a function of the nanoflare storm properties. These orderings, or time lags, are clearly exhibited in loop observations in all channels. What is especially exciting is that we identify these time lag patterns in observations of the seemingly steady diffuse corona as well. We model the diffuse corona as a line-of-sight integration of many thousands of completely independent, impulsively heated strands. The time lags of the simulated and actual observations are in excellent agreement. Our results suggest that impulsive nanoflare heating is ubiquitous within active regions.
This research was supported through an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA.
Klimchuk James
Viall Nicholeen
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