Key Aspects of Coronal Heating

Abstract

We highlight ten key aspects of coronal heating that must be understood before we can consider the problem to be solved. (1) All coronal heating is impulsive. (2) The details of coronal heating matter. (3) The corona is filled with elemental magnetic stands. (4) The corona is densely populated with current sheets. (5) The strands must reconnect to prevent an infinite buildup of stress. (6) Nanoflares repeat with different frequencies. (7) What is the characteristic magnitude of energy release? (8) What causes the collective behavior responsible for loops? (9) What are the onset conditions for energy release? (10) Chromospheric nanoflares are not a primary source of coronal plasma. Significant progress in solving the coronal heating problem will require a coordination of approaches: observational studies, field-aligned hydrodynamic simulations, large-scale and localized 3D MHD simulations, and possibly also kinetic simulations. There is a unique value to each of these approaches, and the community must strive to coordinate better.

Published by Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. A, 16 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
• Highly Efficient Modeling of Dynamic Coronal Loops
• A Contemporary View of Coronal Heating
• A catastrophe model for fast magnetic reconnection onset
• The Role of Type II Spicules in the Upper Solar Atmosphere
• Are Chromospheric Nanoflares a Primary Source of Coronal Plasma?
• Are constant loop widths an artifact of the background and the spatial resolution?
• High-resolution observations of active region moss and its dynamics
• MHD modeling of coronal loops: injection of high-speed chromospheric flows

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Why does steady-state magnetic reconnection have a maximum local rate of order 0.1?
• Fan Loops Observed by IRIS, EIS and AIA
• Unravelling the components of a multi-thermal coronal loop using magnetohydrodynamic seismology
• Spectroscopic evidence of Alfvén wave damping in the off-limb solar corona
• Discovery of the subsecond linearly polarized spikes of synchrotron origin in the UV Ceti giant optical flare
• Multifractal Solar EUV Intensity Fluctuations and their Implications for Coronal Heating Models