Coronal heating: an overview of observations and models
Abstract
The list of potential mechanisms that contribute to the heating of the hottest domain in the outer atmosphere of the Sun (and of other stars like the Sun) is steadily growing. The last few years have seen both a rapid increase in computational power and in angular and temporal resolution of space--based instruments. This is gradually leading to a deeper understanding of coronal heating, but has also taught us that the corona is a very dynamic place with interrelated processes on the scale of the large bipolar active regions down to very small spatio-temporal scales. In this overview, I discuss some of the recent developments in our understanding of stellar coronae, primarily focusing on those processes that result in relatively long-lived bright coronal structures. Recent high-resolution movies taken with the Transition--Region and Coronal Explorer TRACE will be shown to illustrate the complex dynamic character of the solar corona on scales that were unexplored until this year.
- Publication:
-
APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- November 1998
- Bibcode:
- 1998APS..DPP.C2M01S