Observation of Hyperfine Channels of Solar Corona Heating
Abstract
We report here the first direct observations of dynamical events originating in the sun’s cool photosphere and subsequently lighting up the corona. Continuous impulsive events have been tracked from their origin in the photosphere on through to their brightening of the local corona. We achieve this by combining high resolution ground-based data from the 1.6 meter aperture New Solar Telescope (NST) at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO),and satellite data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on-board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The NST observations in a narrow band absorption line, Helium I 10830 Å, reveal unexpected complexes of hyperfine, hot magnetic loops seen to be reaching from the photosphere to the base of the corona. Most of these hyperfine loops are characterized by an apparently constant, but surprisingly narrow diameter of about 100 km all along each loop, and the loops originate on the solar surface from intense, small-scale magnetic field elements. The NST observations detect upward injections of hot plasma that excite the hyperfine loops from the photosphere to the base of the corona. The ejecta have their individual footpoints in the intergranular lanes between the sun’s ubiquitous, convectively driven granules. In many cases, AIA/SDO detects co-spatial and co-temporal brightenings in the overlying, million-degree coronal loops in conjunction with the upward injections along the hyperfine loops. Segments of some of the more intense upward injections are seen as rapid blue-shifted events in simultaneous Hα blue wing images observed at BBSO. In sum, the observations unambiguously show impulsive coronal heating events from upward energy flows originating from intergranular lanes on the solar surface accompanied by co-spatial mass flows.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #220
- Pub Date:
- May 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AAS...22042301C