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Register a new userAsymmetries in Coronal Spectral lines and Emission Measure Distribution
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Added by
Durgesh Tripathi Dr
Publication date
2013
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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It has previously been argued that 1. spicules do not provide enough pre-heated plasma to fill the corona, and 2. even if they did, additional heating would be required to keep the plasma hot as it expands upward. We here address the question of whether spicules play an important role by injecting plasma at cooler temperatures ($< 2$ MK), which then gets heated to coronal values at higher altitudes. We measure red-blue asymmetries in line profiles formed over a wide range of temperatures in the bright moss areas of two active regions. We derive emission measure distributions from the excess wing emission. We find that the asymmetries and emission measures are small and conclude that spicules do not inject an important (dominant) mass flux into the cores of active regions at temperatures $> 0.6$ MK ($log T > 5.8$). These conclusions apply not only to spicules, but to any process that suddenly heats and accelerates chromospheric plasma (e.g., a chromospheric nanoflare). The traditional picture of coronal heating and chromospheric evaporation appears to remain the most likely explanation of the active region corona.
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Determining the temperature distribution of coronal plasmas can provide stringent constraints on coronal heating. Current observations with the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph onboard Hinode and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory provide diagnostics of the emission measure distribution (EMD) of the coronal plasma. Here we test the reliability of temperature diagnostics using 3D radiative MHD simulations. We produce synthetic observables from the models, and apply the Monte Carlo Markov chain EMD diagnostic. By comparing the derived EMDs with the true distributions from the model we assess the limitations of the diagnostics, as a function of the plasma parameters and of the signal-to-noise of the data. We find that EMDs derived from EIS synthetic data reproduce some general characteristics of the true distributions, but usually show differences from the true EMDs that are much larger than the estimated uncertainties suggest, especially when structures with significantly different density overlap along the line-of-sight. When using AIA synthetic data the derived EMDs reproduce the true EMDs much less accurately, especially for broad EMDs. The differences between the two instruments are due to the: (1) smaller number of constraints provided by AIA data, (2) broad temperature response function of the AIA channels which provide looser constraints to the temperature distribution. Our results suggest that EMDs derived from current observatories may often show significant discrepancies from the true EMDs, rendering their interpretation fraught with uncertainty. These inherent limitations to the method should be carefully considered when using these distributions to constrain coronal heating.
Using data from the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer aboard Hinode, we have studied the coronal plasma in the core of two active regions. Concentrating on the area between opposite polarity moss, we found emission measure distributions having an approximate power-law form EM$propto T^{2.4}$ from $log,T = 5.5$ up to a peak at $log,T = 6.55$. We show that the observations compare very favorably with a simple model of nanoflare-heated loop strands. They also appear to be consistent with more sophisticated nanoflare models. However, in the absence of additional constraints, steady heating is also a viable explanation.
We use Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) data to reconstruct the plasma properties from differential emission measure (DEM) analysis for a previously studied long-lived, low-latitude coronal hole (CH) over its lifetime of ten solar rotations. We initially obtain a non-isothermal DEM distribution with a dominant component centered around 0.9 MK and a secondary smaller component at 1.5 - 2.0 MK. We find that deconvolving the data with the instrument point spread function (PSF) to account for long-range scattered light reduces the secondary hot component. Using the 2012 Venus transit and a 2013 lunar eclipse to test the efficiency of this deconvolution, significant amounts of residual stray light are found for the occulted areas. Accounting for this stray light in the error budget of the different AIA filters further reduces the secondary hot emission, yielding CH DEM distributions that are close to isothermal with the main contribution centered around 0.9 MK. Based on these DEMs, we analyze the evolution of the emission measure (EM), density, and averaged temperature during the CHs lifetime. We find that once the CH is clearly observed in EUV images, the bulk of the CH plasma reveals a quite constant state, i.e. temperature and density reveal no major changes, whereas the total CH area and the photospheric magnetic fine structure inside the CH show a distinct evolutionary pattern. These findings suggest that CH plasma properties are mostly set at the CH formation or/and that all CHs have similar plasma properties.
The temperature distribution of the emitting plasma is a crucial constraint when studying the heating of solar flare footpoints. However, determining this for impulsive phase footpoints has been difficult in the past due to insufficient spatial resolution to resolve the footpoints from the loop structures, and a lack of spectral and temporal coverage. We use the capabilities of Hinode/EIS to obtain the first emission measure distributions (EMDs) from impulsive phase footpoints in six flares. Observations with good spectral coverage were analysed using a regularized inversion method to recover the EMDs. We find that the EMDs all share a peak temperature of around 8 MK, with lines formed around this temperature having emission measures peaking between 10^28 and 10^29 cm^-5, indicating a substantial presence of plasma at very high temperatures within the footpoints. An EMD gradient of EM(T) ~ T is found in all events. Previous theoretical work on emission measure gradients shows this to be consistent with a scenario in which the deposited flare energy directly heats only the top layer of the flare chromosphere, while deeper layers are heated by conduction.
To solve a number of problems in solar physics related to mechanisms of energy release in solar corona parameters of hot coronal plasma are required, such as energy distribution, emission measure, differential emission measure, and their evolution with time. Of special interest is the distribution of solar plasma by energies, which can evolve from a nearly Maxwellian distribution to a distribution with a more complex structure during a solar flare. The exact form of this distribution for low-energy particles, which receive the bulk of flare energy, is still poorly known; therefore, detailed investigations are required. We present a developed method of simultaneous fitting of data from two spacecrafts Solar Dynamics Observatory/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (SDO/AIA) and Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), using a differential emission measure and a thin target model for the August 14, 2010 flare event.
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