Prevalence of Thermal Non-Equilibrium over an Active Region

TL;DR

This study investigates coronal rain showers in an active region, demonstrating their widespread occurrence and linking them to thermal non-equilibrium processes, which suggests prevalent stratified and high-frequency heating in the solar corona.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed morphological and thermodynamic analysis of coronal rain showers, confirming their association with thermal non-equilibrium in active regions.

Findings

Coronal rain showers are widespread across the active region.

Showers are consistent with the thermal non-equilibrium scenario.

Estimated number of showers indicates prevalent TNE in the active region.

Abstract

Recent observations have shown that besides the characteristic multi-million degree component the corona also contains a large amount of cool material called coronal rain, whose clumps are 10 - 100 times cooler and denser than the surroundings and are often organised in larger events termed showers. Thermal instability (TI) within a coronal loop in a state of thermal non-equilibrium (TNE) is the leading mechanism behind the formation of coronal rain but no investigation on showers exists to date. In this study, we conduct a morphological and thermodynamic multi-wavelength study of coronal rain showers observed in an active region (AR) off-limb with IRIS and SDO, spanning chromospheric to transition region and coronal temperatures. Rain showers were found to be widespread across the AR over the 5.45-hour observing time, with average length, width and duration of 27.37$\pm$11.95 Mm, 2.14$\pm$0.74 Mm, and 35.22$\pm$20.35 min, respectively. We find a good correspondence between showers and the cooling coronal structures consistent with the TNE-TI scenario, thereby properly identifying coronal loops in the 'coronal veil', including the strong expansion at low heights and an almost zero expansion in the corona. This agrees with previous work suggesting that the observed zero expansion in the EUV is due to specific cross-field temperature distribution. We estimate the total number of showers to be 155$\pm$40, leading to a TNE volume of 4.56$\pm$3.71 $\times$ $10^{28}$cm$^{3}$, i.e. on the same order of the AR volume. This suggests a prevalence of TNE over the AR indicating strongly stratified and high-frequency heating on average.