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Register a new userNanoflare Evidence from Analysis of the X-Ray Variability of an Active Region Observed with Hinode/XRT
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The heating of the solar corona is one of the big questions in astrophysics. Rapid pulses called nanoflares are among the best candidate mechanisms. The analysis of the time variability of coronal X-ray emission is potentially a very useful tool to detect impulsive events. We analyze the small-scale variability of a solar active region in a high cadence Hinode/XRT observation. The dataset allows us to detect very small deviations of emission fluctuations from the distribution expected for a constant rate. We discuss the deviations in the light of the pulsed-heating scenario.
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It is generally agreed that small impulsive energy bursts called nanoflares are responsible for at least some of the Suns hot corona, but whether they are the explanation for most of the multi-million degree plasma has been a matter of ongoing debate. We here present evidence that nanoflares are widespread in an active region observed by the X-Ray Telescope on-board the Hinode mission. The distributions of intensity fluctuations have small but important asymmetries, whether taken from individual pixels, multi-pixel subregions, or the entire active region. Negative fluctuations (corresponding to reduced intensity) are greater in number but weaker in amplitude, so that the median fluctuation is negative compared to a mean of zero. Using MonteCarlo simulations, we show that only part of this asymmetry can be explained by Poisson photon statistics. The remainder is explainable with a tendency for exponentially decreasing intensity, such as would be expected from a cooling plasma produced from a nanoflare. We suggest that nanoflares are a universal heating process within active regions.
NuSTAR is a highly sensitive focusing hard X-ray (HXR) telescope and has observed several small microflares in its initial solar pointings. In this paper, we present the first joint observation of a microflare with NuSTAR and Hinode/XRT on 2015 April 29 at ~11:29 UT. This microflare shows heating of material to several million Kelvin, observed in Soft X-rays (SXRs) with Hinode/XRT, and was faintly visible in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) with SDO/AIA. For three of the four NuSTAR observations of this region (pre-, decay, and post phases) the spectrum is well fitted by a single thermal model of 3.2-3.5 MK, but the spectrum during the impulsive phase shows additional emission up to 10 MK, emission equivalent to A0.1 GOES class. We recover the differential emission measure (DEM) using SDO/AIA, Hinode/XRT, and NuSTAR, giving unprecedented coverage in temperature. We find the pre-flare DEM peaks at ~3 MK and falls off sharply by 5 MK; but during the microflares impulsive phase the emission above 3 MK is brighter and extends to 10 MK, giving a heating rate of about $2.5 times 10^{25}$ erg s$^{-1}$. As the NuSTAR spectrum is purely thermal we determined upper-limits on the possible non-thermal bremsstrahlung emission. We find that for the accelerated electrons to be the source of the heating requires a power-law spectrum of $delta ge 7$ with a low energy cut-off $E_{c} lesssim 7$ keV. In summary, this first NuSTAR microflare strongly resembles much more powerful flares.
The X-Ray Telescope (XRT) on the Japanese/USA/UK {it Hinode (Solar-B)} spacecraft has detected emission from a quiescent active region core that is consistent with nanoflare heating. The fluxes from 10 broadband X-ray filters and filter combinations were used to constructed Differential Emission Measure (DEM) curves. In addition to the expected active region peak at Log T = 6.3-6.5, we find a high-temperature component with significant emission measure at Log T $>$ 7.0. This emission measure is weak compared to the main peak -- the DEM is down by almost three orders of magnitude -- which accounts of the fact that it has not been observed with earlier instruments. It is also consistent with spectra of quiescent active regions: no Fe XIX lines are observed in a CHIANTI synthetic spectrum generated using the XRT DEM distribution. The DEM result is successfully reproduced with a simple two-component nanoflare model.
In order to better understand the possibility of coronal heating by MHD waves, we analyze Fe xii 195.12{AA} data observed with EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) onboard Hinode. We performed a Fourier analysis of EUV intensity and Doppler velocity time series data in the active region corona. Notable intensity and Doppler velocity oscillations were found for two moss regions out of the five studied, while only small oscillations were found for five apexes of loops. The amplitudes of the oscillations were 0.4 - 5.7% for intensity and 0.2 - 1.2 kms-1 for Doppler velocity. In addition, oscillations of only Doppler velocity were seen relatively less often in the data. We compared the amplitudes of intensity and those of Doppler velocity in order to identify MHD wave modes, and calculated the phase delays between Fourier components of intensity and those of Doppler velocity. The results are interpreted in terms of MHD waves as follows: (1) few kink modes or torsional Alfven mode waves were seen in both moss regions and the apexes of loops; (2) upwardly propagating and standing slowmode waves were found inmoss regions; and (3) consistent with previous studies, estimated values of energy flux of the waves were several orders of magnitude lower than that required for heating active regions.
We analyze coordinated Hinode XRT and EIS observations of a non-flaring active region to investigate the thermal properties of coronal plasma taking advantage of the complementary diagnostics provided by the two instruments. In particular we want to explore the presence of hot plasma in non-flaring regions. Independent temperature analyses from the XRT multi-filter dataset, and the EIS spectra, including the instrument entire wavelength range, provide a cross-check of the different temperature diagnostics techniques applicable to broad-band and spectral data respectively, and insights into cross-calibration of the two instruments. The emission measure distribution, EM(T), we derive from the two datasets have similar width and peak temperature, but show a systematic shift of the absolute values, the EIS EM(T) being smaller than XRT EM(T) by approximately a factor 2. We explore possible causes of this discrepancy, and we discuss the influence of the assumptions for the plasma element abundances. Specifically, we find that the disagreement between the results from the two instruments is significantly mitigated by assuming chemical composition closer to the solar photospheric composition rather than the often adopted coronal composition (Feldman 1992). We find that the data do not provide conclusive evidence on the high temperature (log T[K] >~ 6.5) tail of the plasma temperature distribution, however, suggesting its presence to a level in agreement with recent findings for other non-flaring regions.
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