SWAP Observations of the Long-Term, Large-Scale Evolution of the EUV Solar Corona

TL;DR

This study uses SWAP EUV images to analyze the long-term evolution of the solar corona over three years, revealing persistent large-scale structures and their relation to the solar cycle.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis of EUV corona evolution over multiple years using SWAP data, highlighting persistent features and their connection to solar activity.

Findings

Persistent bright, diffuse features linked to open magnetic fields

Evolution of the corona varies with height and solar cycle phase

Coronal fans observed in EUV are related to white-light structures

Abstract

The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) EUV solar telescope on board the Project for On-Board Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) spacecraft has been regularly observing the solar corona in a bandpass near 17.4 nm since February 2010. With a field-of-view of 54x54 arcmin, SWAP provides the widest-field images of the EUV corona available from the perspective of the Earth. By carefully processing and combining multiple SWAP images it is possible to produce low-noise composites that reveal the structure of the EUV corona to relatively large heights. A particularly important step in this processing was to remove instrumental stray light from the images by determining and deconvolving SWAP's point spread function (PSF) from the observations. In this paper we use the resulting images to conduct the first ever study of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the corona observed in the EUV over a three-year period that includes the complete rise phase of solar cycle 24. Of particular note is the persistence over many solar rotations of bright, diffuse features composed of open magnetic field that overlie polar crown filaments and extend to large heights above the solar surface. These features appear to be related to coronal fans, which have previously been observed in white-light coronagraph images and, at low heights, in the EUV. We also discuss the evolution of the corona at different heights above the solar surface and the evolution of the corona over the course of the solar cycle by hemisphere.