| Issue |
A&A
Volume 667, November 2022
Solar Orbiter First Results (Nominal Mission Phase)
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A166 | |
| Number of page(s) | 13 | |
| Section | The Sun and the Heliosphere | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202244170 | |
| Published online | 25 November 2022 | |
Solar coronal heating from small-scale magnetic braids⋆
1
Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: chitta@mps.mpg.de
2
Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, 91405 Orsay, France
3
Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence – SIDC, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Ringlaan -3- Av. Circulaire, 1180 Brussels, Belgium
4
School of Space Research, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi 446-701, Republic of Korea
5
Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos, World Radiation Center, 7260 Davos Dorf, Switzerland
6
ETH-Zürich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Str. 27, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland
7
UCL-Mullard Space Science Laboratory, Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6NT, UK
8
Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, Moscow State University, 119992 Moscow, Russia
9
Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, 3251 Hanover Street, Building 252, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
10
Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, NASA Research Park, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA
Received:
2
June
2022
Accepted:
23
September
2022
Relaxation of braided coronal magnetic fields through reconnection is thought to be a source of energy to heat plasma in active region coronal loops. However, observations of active region coronal heating associated with an untangling of magnetic braids remain sparse. One reason for this paucity could be the lack of coronal observations with a sufficiently high spatial and temporal resolution to capture this process in action. Using new observations with high spatial resolution (250−270 km on the Sun) and high cadence (3−10 s) from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on board Solar Orbiter, we observed the untangling of small-scale coronal braids in different active regions. The untangling is associated with impulsive heating of the gas in these braided loops. We assess that coronal magnetic braids overlying cooler chromospheric filamentary structures are perhaps more common. Furthermore, our observations show signatures of spatially coherent and intermittent coronal heating during the relaxation of the magnetic braids. Our study reveals the operation of gentle and impulsive modes of magnetic reconnection in the solar corona.
Key words: Sun: corona / Sun: magnetic fields / magnetic reconnection / plasmas
Movies are available at https://www.aanda.org
© L. P. Chitta et al. 2022
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe-to-Open model.
Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.