Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsh44a..02s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SH44A-02
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
[7507] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Chromosphere
Scientific paper
What supplies the large amount of energy in the radiation while maintaining the rapid temperature increase from about 6000 K at the solar surface to 2 MK in the corona is one of the outstanding questions in solar physics and astrophysics. Although over the past decades countless models and mechanisms have been proposed, observations (from above the corona) have decidedly shown available power insufficient to supply the radiative heat loss if using the heat conversion efficiencies given by the previously proposed mechanisms. Furthermore, most proposed heating mechanisms are efficient only at the higher altitudes, i.e., above 800 km, whereas more heat energy is radiated at the lower altitudes. In comparison, to maintain the solar wind requires only a small fraction of the energy that goes into the radiative loss. We propose a model of strongly damped Alfvén waves in which the heating is through plasma-neutral collisions in the chromosphere, an efficient heating mechanism that occurs naturally in a partially ionized medium. The high-frequency portion of the source power spectrum is damped at the lower altitudes, depositing heat there. The lower-frequency perturbations, which carry only a fraction of the total source power, whereas, are nearly undamped and can be observed above the corona (where all observations of the chromosphere are physically made). We present a simple analytical one-dimensional model of the self-consistent plasma-neutral-electromagnetic system and show, using the parameters from a semi-empirical model for quiet-Sun conditions, that the mechanism can generate enough heat to account for the radiative loss in the chromosphere.
Song Paul
Vasyliūnas Vytenis M.
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