"Probing the mechanism of coronal heating with variability of the solar X-ray and EUV emission"
Grigory Vekstein (School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom)
Abstract:
If
the mechanism responsible for creating hot corona of the Sun (as well as
of many other stars) is a magnetic one, the underlying heating events are
likely to be highly fragmented both in space and in time. Therefore, the
nanoflare heating scenario, where these features are at the heart of the
concept, is a strong candidate. The major problem is to find a way of
testing this theory while individual nanoflares remain beyond
observational recognition.
Here I'll discuss a possibility of probing nanoflares with variability of
the coronal X-ray and EUV emission. Thus, I
present results of numerical simulation of bright coronal loops heated by
nanoflares. The aim is to investigate how the imposed power-law energy
spectrum of heating events (nanoflares) translates into fluctuations in
the intensity of the coronal emission, which can be detected
observationally as X-ray and EUV brightenings.
These theoretical predictions are compared with recently reported analysis
of the observed fluctuations, and I discuss their implications on the
deduced energy and occurrence rate of nanoflares.