Observationally quantified reconnection providing a viable mechanism for active region coronal heating.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29449655.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-03056-8 and PMC identifier 5814417.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The heating of the Sun's corona has been explained by several different mechanisms including wave dissipation and magnetic reconnection. While both have been shown capable of supplying the requisite power, neither has been used in a quantitative model of observations fed by measured inputs. Here we show that impulsive reconnection is capable of producing an active region corona agreeing both qualitatively and quantitatively with extreme-ultraviolet observations. We calculate the heating power proportional to the velocity difference between magnetic footpoints and the photospheric plasma, called the non-ideal velocity. The length scale of flux elements reconnected in the corona is found to be around 160 km. The differential emission measure of the model corona agrees with that derived using multi-wavelength images. Synthesized extreme-ultraviolet images resemble observations both in their loop-dominated appearance and their intensity histograms. This work provides compelling evidence that impulsive reconnection events are a viable mechanism for heating the corona.