Related papers: Self-Regulation of Solar Coronal Heating Process v…
I present a novel view on the problem of solar coronal heating. In my picture, coronal heating should be viewed as a self-regulating process that works to keep the coronal plasma marginally collisionless. The self-regulating mechanism is…
I propose that solar coronal heating is a self-regulating process that keeps the coronal plasma roughly marginally collisionless. The self-regulating mechanism is based on the interplay of two effects. First, plasma density controls coronal…
We explore the suggestions by Uzdensky (2007) and Cassak et al. (2008) that coronal loops heated by magnetic reconnection should self-organize to a state of marginal collisionality. We discuss their model of coronal loop dynamics with a…
The temperature of the solar atmosphere increases from thousands to millions of degrees moving from the lower layer (chromosphere) to the outermost one (corona), while the density drops accordingly. The mechanism behind this phenomenon,…
We develop a three-dimensional kinetic model of the solar transition region and corona in which the plasma above the chromosphere is collisionless and embedded in a uniform magnetic field. Heating occurs intermittently at discrete locations…
Turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and shocks can be present in explosively unstable plasmas, forming a new electromagnetic environment, which we call here turbulent reconnection, and where spontaneous formation of current sheets takes…
We present a model for the spontaneous onset of fast magnetic reconnection in a weakly collisional plasma, such as the solar corona. When a current layer of macroscopic width undergoes collisional (Sweet-Parker) reconnection, a narrow…
The hot solar corona exists because of the balance between radiative and conductive cooling and some counteracting heating mechanism which remains one of the major puzzles in solar physics. The coronal thermal equilibrium is perturbed by…
The energy that heats the magnetically closed solar corona originates in the complex motions of the massive photosphere. Turbulent photospheric convection slowly displaces the footpoints of coronal field lines, causing them to become…
Magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma process associated with a rapid dissipation of magnetic energy, is believed to power many disruptive phenomena in laboratory plasma devices, the Earth magnetosphere, and the solar corona.…
A recent analysis has suggested that the heating of plasma loops in the solar corona depends not just on the Poynting flux but also on processes yet to be identified. This discovery reflects and refines earlier questions such as, why and…
We point out that a conventional construction placed upon observations of accreting black holes, in which their nonthermal X-ray spectra are produced by inverse comptonization in a coronal plasma, suggests that the plasma is marginally…
Recently it was pointed out that nonmodally (transiently and/or adiabatically) pre-amplified waves in shear flows, undergoing subsequent viscous damping, can ultimately heat the ambient flow. The key ingredient of this process is the…
This Letter reports the first observational estimate of the heating rate in the slowly expanding solar corona. The analysis exploits the simultaneous remote and local observations of the same coronal plasma volume with the Solar…
It is clear that the solar corona is being heated and that coronal magnetic fields undergo reconnection all the time. Here we attempt to show that these two facts are in fact related - i.e. coronal reconnection generates heat. This attempt…
The problem of solar corona heating remains one of key puzzles in astrophysics for a few decades; but none of the proposed mechanisms can give a definitive answer to this question. As a result, the novel scenarios are still suggested. Here,…
Context. Photospheric motions shuffle the footpoints of the strong axial magnetic field that threads coronal loops giving rise to turbulent nonlinear dynamics characterized by the continuous formation and dissipation of field-aligned…
Coronal plasma in the cores of solar active regions is impulsively heated to more than 5 MK. The nature and location of the magnetic energy source responsible for such impulsive heating is poorly understood. Using observations of seven…
Prompted by the relevant problem of temperature inversion (i.e. gradient of density anti-correlated to the gradient of temperature) in astrophysics, we introduce a novel method to model a gravitationally confined multi-component…
Data obtained in the framework of the INTERBALL-Tail Probe (1995-2000) and RHESSI (from 2002 to the present) projects have revealed variations in the X-ray intensity of the solar corona in the photon energy range of 2-15 keV during the…