Quiet Sun impulsive events observed with NuSTAR during solar minimum

TL;DR

This study used NuSTAR's high sensitivity to observe faint impulsive events in the quiet Sun during solar minimum, revealing thermal properties and energy scales that differ from active region flares, with no evidence of non-thermal emission.

Contribution

First observations of quiet Sun impulsive events with NuSTAR, providing detailed thermal parameters and upper limits on non-thermal emissions, highlighting differences from active region flares.

Findings

Seven quiet Sun flares observed with NuSTAR

Thermal energies between 2.5-8.9 x 10^{26} erg

No evidence of non-thermal emission detected

Abstract

The investigation of small-scale energy release in the Sun's atmosphere is important in understanding how the corona is heated. Previous work has been able to study small EUV and SXR brightenings outside of active regions (i.e. the quiet Sun), but with HXRs this has mostly focused on active region transients/microflares due to the sensitivity of available telescopes. In this paper we present observations of the quiet Sun with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), an X-ray imaging spectrometer with much greater sensitivity than previous instruments, allowing the observation of faint events. During the recent solar minimum, NuSTAR captured seven quiet Sun flares/impulsive brightenings, three on 21 February 2020, and four on 12-13 September 2020. From fitting their NuSTAR HXR spectra we find temperatures of 3.1-4.0 MK and emission measures between (0.75-17.0) $\times 10^{43}$ cm$^{-3}$, which gives thermal energies between (2.5-8.9) $\times 10^{26}$ erg. Only one event, a mini-filament eruption, showed evidence of slightly higher temperatures emission, confirmed through Differential Emission Measure analysis. None of the events showed evidence of non-thermal emission in their NuSTAR spectra, and we placed upper limits to the accelerated electron population. The thermal parameters for these quiet Sun events seem to scale differently to previously studied active region flares, suggesting a different energy release process might be dominating. However, this conclusion is affected by the different sensitivity and biases introduced by the various instruments and analysis approaches used.