When hot meets cold: post-flare coronal rain

TL;DR

This paper presents a simulation of post-flare coronal rain, revealing how thermal instability causes catastrophic cooling in post-flare loops, reproducing observed phenomena and enhancing understanding of the solar corona's mass and energy cycle.

Contribution

The study introduces a comprehensive simulation of the entire flare evolution, successfully reproducing coronal rain and dark loop systems, and analyzes the mass and energy processes involved.

Findings

Simulation reproduces post-flare coronal rain.

Thermal instability causes catastrophic cooling.

Dark post-flare loop systems appear during cooling.

Abstract

Most solar flares demonstrate a prolonged, hourlong post-flare (or gradual) phase, characterized by arcade-like, post-flare loops (PFLs) visible in many extreme ultraviolet (EUV) passbands. These coronal loops are filled with hot -- $\sim 30 \,\mathrm{MK}$ -- and dense plasma, evaporated from the chromosphere during the impulsive phase of the flare, and they very gradually recover to normal coronal density and temperature conditions. During this gradual cooling down to $\sim 1 \,\mathrm{MK}$ regimes, much cooler -- $\sim 0.01 \,\mathrm{MK}$ -- and denser coronal rain is frequently observed inside PFLs. Understanding PFL dynamics in this long-duration, gradual phase is crucial to the entire corona-chromosphere mass and energy cycle. Here we report a simulation in which a solar flare evolves from pre-flare, over impulsive phase all the way into its gradual phase, which successfully reproduces post-flare coronal rain. This rain results from catastrophic cooling caused by thermal instability, and we analyse the entire mass and energy budget evolution driving this sudden condensation phenomenon. We find that the runaway cooling and rain formation also induces the appearance of dark post-flare loop systems, as observed in EUV channels. We confirm and augment earlier observational findings, suggesting that thermal conduction and radiative losses alternately dominate the cooling of PFLs.