The solar corona as an active medium for magnetoacoustic waves

The presence and interplay of continuous cooling and heating processes maintaining the corona of the Sun at the observed one million K temperature were recently understood to have crucial effects on the dynamics and stability of magnetoacoustic waves. These essentially compressive waves perturb the coronal thermal equilibrium, leading to the phenomenon of a wave-induced thermal misbalance. Representing an additional natural mechanism for the exchange of energy between the plasma and the wave, thermal misbalance makes the corona an active medium for magnetoacoustic waves, so that the wave can not only lose but also gain energy from the coronal heating source (similarly to burning gases, lasers and masers). We review recent achievements in this newly emerging research field, focussing on the effects that slow-mode magnetoacoustic waves experience as a back-reaction of this perturbed coronal thermal equilibrium. The new effects include enhanced frequency-dependent damping or amplification of slow waves, and effective, not associated with the coronal plasma non-uniformity, dispersion. We also discuss the possibility to probe the unknown coronal heating function by observations of slow waves and linear theory of thermal instabilities. The manifold of the new properties that slow waves acquire from a thermodynamically active nature of the solar corona indicate a clear need for accounting for the effects of combined coronal heating/cooling processes not only for traditional problems of the formation and evolution of prominences and coronal rain, but also for an adequate modelling and interpretation of magnetohydrodynamic waves.

Numerical Study of Divergence Cleaning and Coronal Heating/Acceleration Methods in the 3D COIN-TVD MHD Model

In the solar coronal numerical simulation, the coronal heating/acceleration and the magnetic divergence cleaning techniques are very important. The coronal–interplanetary total variation diminishing (COIN-TVD) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model is developed in recent years that can effectively realize the coronal–interplanetary three-dimensional (3D) solar wind simulation. In this study, we focus on the 3D coronal solar wind simulation by using the COIN-TVD MHD model. In order to simulate the heating and acceleration of solar wind in the coronal region, the volume heating term in the model is improved efficiently. Then, the influence of the different methods to reduce the ∇⋅B constraint error on the coronal solar wind structure is discussed. Here, we choose Carrington Rotation (CR) 2199 as a study case and try to make a comparison of the simulation results among the different magnetic divergence cleaning methods, including the diffusive method, the Powell method, and the composite diffusive/Powell method, by using the 3D COIN-TVD MHD model. Our simulation results show that with the different magnetic divergence cleaning methods, the ∇⋅B error can be reduced in different levels during the solar wind simulation. Among the three divergence cleaning methods we used, the composite diffusive/Powell method can maintain the divergence cleaning constraint better to a certain extent, and the relative magnetic field divergence error can be controlled in the order of 10−9. Although these numerical simulations are performed for the background solar corona, these methods are also suitable for the simulation of CME initiation and propagation.

Extreme-ultraviolet bursts and nanoflares in the quiet-Sun transition region and corona

The quiet solar corona consists of myriads of loop-like features, with magnetic fields originating from network and internetwork regions on the solar surface. The continuous interaction between these different magnetic patches leads to transient brightenings or bursts that might contribute to the heating of the solar atmosphere. The literature on a variety of such burst phenomena in the solar atmosphere is rich. However, it remains unclear whether such transients, which are mostly observed in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), play a significant role in atmospheric heating. We revisit the open question of these bursts as a prelude to the new high-resolution EUV imagery expected from the recently launched Solar Orbiter. We use EUV image sequences recorded by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to investigate statistical properties of the bursts. We detect the bursts in the 171 Å filter images of AIA in an automated way through a pixel-wise analysis by imposing different intensity thresholds. By exploiting the high cadence (12 s) of the AIA observations, we find that the distribution of lifetimes of these events peaks at about 120 s. However, a significant number of events also have lifetimes shorter than 60 s. The sizes of the detected bursts are limited by the spatial resolution, which indicates that a larger number of events might be hidden in the AIA data. We estimate that about 100 new bursts appear per second on the whole Sun. The detected bursts have nanoflare-like energies of 1024 erg per event. Based on this, we estimate that at least 100 times more events of a similar nature would be required to account for the energy that is required to heat the corona. When AIA observations are considered alone, the EUV bursts discussed here therefore play no significant role in the coronal heating of the quiet Sun. If the coronal heating of the quiet Sun is mainly bursty, then the high-resolution EUV observations from Solar Orbiter may be able to reduce the deficit in the number of EUV bursts seen with SDO/AIA at least partly by detecting more such events.