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Register a new userMagnetic Jam in the Corona of the Sun
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The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, contains plasma at temperatures of more than a million K, more than 100 times hotter that solar surface. How this gas is heated is a fundamental question tightly interwoven with the structure of the magnetic field in the upper atmosphere. Conducting numerical experiments based on magnetohydrodynamics we account for both the evolving three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere and the complex interaction of magnetic field and plasma. Together this defines the formation and evolution of coronal loops, the basic building block prominently seen in X-rays and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images. The structures seen as coronal loops in the EUV can evolve quite differently from the magnetic field. While the magnetic field continuously expands as new magnetic flux emerges through the solar surface, the plasma gets heated on successively emerging fieldlines creating an EUV loop that remains roughly at the same place. For each snapshot the EUV images outline the magnetic field, but in contrast to the traditional view, the temporal evolution of the magnetic field and the EUV loops can be different. Through this we show that the thermal and the magnetic evolution in the outer atmosphere of a cool star has to be treated together, and cannot be simply separated as done mostly so far.
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The X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) emissions from the low-mass stars significantly affect the evolution of the planetary atmosphere. However, it is, observationally difficult to constrain the stellar high-energy emission because of the strong interstellar extinction of EUV photons. In this study, we simulate the XUV (X-ray+EUV) emission from the Sun-like stars by extending the solar coronal heating model that self-consistently solves, with sufficiently high resolution, the surface-to-coronal energy transport, turbulent coronal heating, and coronal thermal response by conduction and radiation. The simulations are performed with a range of loop lengths and magnetic filling factors at the stellar surface. With the solar parameters, the model reproduces the observed solar XUV spectrum below the Lyman edge, thus validating its capability of predicting the XUV spectra of other Sun-like stars. The model also reproduces the observed nearly-linear relation between the unsigned magnetic flux and the X-ray luminosity. From the simulation runs with various loop lengths and filling factors, we also find a scaling relation, namely $log L_{rm EUV} = 9.93 + 0.67 log L_{rm X}$, where $L_{rm EUV}$ and $L_{rm X}$ are the luminosity in the EUV and X-ray range, respectively, in cgs. By assuming a power-law relation between the Rossby number and the magnetic filling factor, we reproduce the renowned relation between the Rossby number and the X-ray luminosity. We also propose an analytical description of the energy injected into the corona, which, in combination with the conventional Rosner-Tucker-Vaiana scaling law, semi-analytically explains the simulation results. This study refines the concepts of solar and stellar coronal heating and derives a theoretical relation for estimating the hidden stellar EUV luminosity from X-ray observations.
The coronal magnetic field above a particular photospheric region will vanish at a certain number of points, called null points. These points can be found directly in a potential field extrapolation or their density can be estimated from Fourier spectrum of the magnetogram. The spectral estimate, which assumes that the extrapolated field is random, homogeneous and has Gaussian statistics, is found here to be relatively accurate for quiet Sun magnetograms from SOHOs MDI. The majority of null points occur at low altitudes, and their distribution is dictated by high wavenumbers in the Fourier spectrum. This portion of the spectrum is affected by Poisson noise, and as many as five-sixths of null points identified from a direct extrapolation can be attributed to noise. The null distribution above 1500 km is found to depend on wavelengths that are reliably measured by MDI in either its low-resolution or high-resolution mode. After correcting the spectrum to remove white noise and compensate for the modulation transfer function we find that a potential field extrapolation contains, on average, one magnetic null point, with altitude greater than 1.5 Mm, above every 322 square Mm patch of quiet Sun. Analysis of 562 quiet Sun magnetograms spanning the two latest solar minimum shows that the null point density is relatively constant with roughly 10% day-to-day variation. At heights above 1.5 Mm, the null point density decreases approximately as the inverse cube of height. The photospheric field in the quiet Sun is well approximated as that from discrete elements with mean flux 1.0e19 Mx distributed randomly with density n=0.007 per square Mm.
We analyze space- and ground-based data for the old ($7.0pm0.3$~Gyr) solar analogs 16 Cyg A and B. The stars were observed with the Cosmic Origins UV Spectrographs on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on 23 October 2015 and 3 February 2016 respectively, and with the Chandra X-ray Observatory on 7 February 2016. Time-series data in ion{Ca}{2} data are used to place the UV data in context. The UV spectra of 18 Sco (3.7$pm0.5$ Gyr), the Sun (4.6$pm0.04$ Gyr) and $alpha$ Cen A ($5.4_{-0.2}^{+1.2}$ Gyr), appear remarkably similar, pointing to a convergence of magnetic heating rates for G2 main-sequence stars older than $approx 2-4$ Gyr. But the B components X-ray (0.3-2.5 keV) flux lies 20$times$ below a well-known minimum level reported by Schmitt. As reported for $alpha$~Cen~A, the coronal temperature probably lies below that detectable in soft X-rays. No solar UV flux spectra of comparable resolution to stellar data exist, but they are badly needed for comparison with stellar data. Center-to-limb (C-L) variations are re-evaluated for lines such as ion{Ca}{2} through to X-rays, with important consequences for observing activity cycles in such features. We also call into question work that has mixed solar intensity-intensity statistics with flux-flux relations of stars.
We present a series of numerical simulations of the quiet Sun plasma threaded by magnetic fields that extend from the upper convection zone into the low corona. We discuss an efficient, simplified approximation to the physics of optically thick radiative transport through the surface layers, and investigate the effects of convective turbulence on the magnetic structure of the Suns atmosphere in an initially unipolar (open field) region. We find that the net Poynting flux below the surface is on average directed toward the interior, while in the photosphere and chromosphere the net flow of electromagnetic energy is outward into the solar corona. Overturning convective motions between these layers driven by rapid radiative cooling appears to be the source of energy for the oppositely directed fluxes of electromagnetic energy.
We investigate the fine structure of magnetic fields in the atmosphere of the quiet Sun. We use photospheric magnetic field measurements from {sc Sunrise}/IMaX with unprecedented spatial resolution to extrapolate the photospheric magnetic field into higher layers of the solar atmosphere with the help of potential and force-free extrapolation techniques. We find that most magnetic loops which reach into the chromosphere or higher have one foot point in relatively strong magnetic field regions in the photosphere. $91%$ of the magnetic energy in the mid chromosphere (at a height of 1 Mm) is in field lines, whose stronger foot point has a strength of more than 300 G, i.e. above the equipartition field strength with convection. The loops reaching into the chromosphere and corona are also found to be asymmetric in the sense that the weaker foot point has a strength $B < 300$ G and is located in the internetwork. Such loops are expected to be strongly dynamic and have short lifetimes, as dictated by the properties of the internetwork fields.
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