Structure of the Solar Dust Corona and its Interaction with the other Coronal Components

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel ground-based imaging technique to study the solar dust corona, revealing interactions with coronal streamers and their effects on dust and molecular emissions.

Contribution

It presents a new method for visualizing the solar dust corona and demonstrates interactions between coronal streamers and dust, including molecular formation.

Findings

Streamers can punch through the dust corona.

Dust corona shape varies over time.

Coronal streamers emit in discrete spectral regions.

Abstract

We developed a new technique for registration of the far solar corona from ground-based observations at distances comparable to those obtained from space coronagraphs. It makes possible visualization of fine details of studied objects invisible by naked eye. Here we demonstrate that streamers of the electron corona sometimes punch the dust corona and that the shape of the dust corona may vary with time. We obtained several experimental evidences that the far coronal streamers (observed directly only from the space or stratosphere) emit only in discrete regions of the visible spectrum like resonance fluorescence of molecules and ions in comets. We found that interaction of the coronal streamers with the dust corona can produce molecules and radicals, which are known to cause the resonance fluorescence in comets.