MUSE observations of small-scale heating events

TL;DR

This paper explores how upcoming high-resolution observations from MUSE can detect signatures of small-scale energy transport and dissipation in the solar corona, using realistic 3D MHD simulations with synthetic spectroscopic data.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of MUSE observations to identify signatures of vortex-driven energy transport and dissipation in the solar corona through advanced simulations.

Findings

Synthetic spectroscopic data reveal detectable signatures of vortex-driven energy transfer.

Small-scale motions contribute significantly to coronal heating processes.

Simulations suggest MUSE can distinguish different energy transport mechanisms.

Abstract

Constraining the processes that drive coronal heating from observations is a difficult task due to the complexity of the solar atmosphere. As upcoming missions such as MUSE will provide coronal observations with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, numerical simulations are becoming increasingly realistic. Despite the availability of synthetic observations from numerical models, line-of-sight effects and the complexity of the magnetic topology in a realistic setup still complicate the prediction of signatures for specific heating processes. 3D MHD simulations have shown that a significant part of the Poynting flux injected into the solar atmosphere is carried by small-scale motions, such as vortices driven by rotational flows inside intergranular lanes. MHD waves excited by these vortices have been suggested to play an important role in the energy transfer between different atmospheric layers. Using synthetic spectroscopic data generated from a coronal loop model incorporating realistic driving by magnetoconvection, we study whether signatures of energy transport by vortices and eventual dissipation can be identified with future missions such as MUSE.