Vol 17, No 3

Location of energy source for coronal heating on the photosphere

Zhen-Xiang Hong, Xu Yang, Ya Wang, Kai-Fan Ji, Hai-Sheng Ji, Wen-Da Cao

Abstract

Abstract It is reported that ultra-fine dynamic ejections along magnetic loops of an active region originate from intergranular lanes and they are associated with subsequent heating in the corona. As continuing work, we analyze the same set of data but focus on a quiet region and the overlying EUV/UV emission as observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We find that there appear to be dark patches scattered across the quiet region and the dark patches always stay along intergranular lanes. Over the dark patches, the average UV/EUV emission at 131, 171, 304 and 1600 Å (middle temperature) is more intense than that of other regions and EUV brightness is negatively correlated with 10830 Å intensity, though, such a trend does not exist for high temperature lines at 94, 193, 211 and 335 Å. For the same quiet region, where both TiO 7057 Å broad band images and 10830 Å filtergrams are available, contours for the darkest lane areas on TiO images and dark patches on 10830 Å filtergrams frequently differ in space. The results suggest that the dark patches do not simply reflect the areas with the darkest lanes but are associated with a kind of enhanced absorption (EA) at 10830 Å. A strict definition for EA with narrow band 10830 Å filtergrams is found to be difficult. In this paper, we define enhanced absorption patches (EAPs) of a quiet region as the areas where emission is less than ∼90% of the mean intensity of the region. The value is equivalent to the average intensity along thin dark loops connecting two moss regions of the active region. A more strict definition for EAPs, say 88%, gives even more intense UV/EUV emission over those in the middle temperature range. The results provide further observational evidence that energy for heating the upper solar atmosphere comes from the intergranular lane area where the magnetic field is constantly brought in by convection motion in granules.

Keywords

Keywords Sun: atmosphere — Sun: photosphere — Sun: transition region — Sun: corona

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