Transition Region and Chromospheric Signatures of Impulsive Heating Events. II. Modeling

TL;DR

This study combines multi-instrument observations to model impulsive heating in solar flares, demonstrating that a multi-threaded approach explains observed red-shifts and other signatures better than single-loop models.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stranded flare model constrained by RHESSI and IRIS data, explaining long-duration red-shifts and energy partitioning among strands.

Findings

Multi-stranded models reproduce red-shifts and line profiles.

Single loop models are inconsistent with observed long-duration red-shifts.

At least 60 strands are energized within a single IRIS pixel during a flare.

Abstract

Results from the Solar Maximum Mission showed a close connection between the hard X-ray and transition region emission in solar flares. Analogously, the modern combination of RHESSI and IRIS data can inform the details of heating processes in ways never before possible. We study a small event that was observed with RHESSI, IRIS, SDO, and Hinode, allowing us to strongly constrain the heating and hydrodynamical properties of the flare, with detailed observations presented in a previous paper. Long duration red-shifts of transition region lines observed in this event, as well as many other events, are fundamentally incompatible with chromospheric condensation on a single loop. We combine RHESSI and IRIS data to measure the energy partition among the many magnetic strands that comprise the flare. Using that observationally determined energy partition, we show that a proper multi-threaded model can reproduce these red-shifts in magnitude, duration, and line intensity, while simultaneously being well constrained by the observed density, temperature, and emission measure. We comment on the implications for both RHESSI and IRIS observations of flares in general, namely that: (1) a single loop model is inconsistent with long duration red-shifts, among other observables; (2) the average time between energization of strands is less than 10 seconds, which implies that for a hard X-ray burst lasting ten minutes, there were at least 60 strands within a single IRIS pixel located on the flare ribbon; (3) the majority of these strands were explosively heated with energy distribution well described by a power law of slope $\approx -1.6$; (4) the multi-stranded model reproduces the observed line profiles, peak temperatures, differential emission measure distributions, and densities.