Steadiness of coronal heating

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution images from Solar Orbiter to investigate the stability of coronal heating, finding most of the corona exhibits minimal brightness variations and suggesting heating occurs without large-scale magnetic reconnection.

Contribution

The paper provides observational evidence that the majority of coronal heating is steady and not driven by large-scale reconnection, challenging common assumptions about solar magnetic activity.

Findings

Coronal brightness variations are predominantly low (around 1%).

Large, rapid magnetic changes are linked to flux emergence, not steady heating.

Most coronal heating likely involves small-scale, pico-flare events or other processes.

Abstract

The EUI instrument on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the most stable, high-resolution images of the solar corona from its orbit with a perihelion near 0.4 AU. A sequence of 360 images obtained at 17.1 nm, between 25-Oct-2022 19:00 and 19:30 UT is scrutinized. One image pixel corresponds to 148 km at the solar surface. The widely-held belief that the outer atmosphere of the Sun is in a continuous state of magnetic turmoil is pitted against the EUI data. The observed plasma variations appear to fall into two classes. By far the dominant behavior is a very low amplitude variation in brightness (1%) in the coronal loops, with larger variations in some footpoint regions. No hints of observable changes in magnetic topology are associated with such small variations. The larger amplitude, more rapid, rarer and less-well organized changes are associated with flux emergence. It is suggested therefore that while magnetic reconnection drives the latter, most of the active corona is heated with no evidence of a role for large-scale (observable) reconnection. Since most coronal emission line widths are subsonic, the bulk of coronal heating, if driven by reconnection, can only be of tangentially discontinuous magnetic fields, with angles below about $0.5c_S/c_A \sim 0.3\beta$, with $\beta$ the plasma beta parameter ($\sim 0.01)$, and $c_S$ and $c_A$ sound and Alfv\'en speeds. If heated by multiple small flare-like events, then these must be $\lesssim 10^{21}$ erg, i.e. pico-flares. But processes other than reconnection have yet to be ruled out, such as viscous dissipation, which may contribute to the steady heating of coronal loops over active regions.