Related papers: Key Aspects of Coronal Heating

This article assesses the current state of understanding of coronal heating, outlines the key elements of a comprehensive strategy for solving the problem, and warns of obstacles that must be overcome along the way.

Even in the absence of resolved flares, the corona is heated to several million degrees. However, despite its importance for the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the solar atmosphere, the origin of this heating remains poorly…

The heating of the solar chromosphere and corona to the observed high temperatures, imply the presence of ongoing heating that balances the strong radiative and thermal conduction losses expected in the solar atmosphere. It has been…

Determining the heating mechanism (or mechanisms) that causes the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and many other stars, to reach temperatures orders of magnitude higher than their surface temperatures has long been a key problem. For decades…

Coronal heating refers to the physical processes that shape and structure the corona of the Sun and are responsible for its multi-million Kelvin temperatures. These processes are revealed in a number of different observational…

It is extremely difficult to simulate the details of coronal heating and also make meaningful predictions of the emitted radiation. Thus, testing realistic models with observations is a major challenge. Observational signatures of coronal…

The question why the solar corona is much hotter than the visible solar surface still puzzles solar researchers. Most theories of the coronal heating involve a tight coupling between the coronal magnetic field and the associated thermal…

The solar corona, the tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun, is orders of magnitude hotter than the solar surface. This 'coronal heating problem' requires the identification of a heat source to balance losses due to thermal conduction,…

What physical mechanisms heat the outer solar or stellar atmosphere to million-Kelvin temperatures is a fundamental but long-standing open question. In particular, the solar corona in active region cores contains an even hotter component…

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 heating through the explosive release of magnetic energy remains an open problem in solar physics. Recent hydrodynamical models attempt an investigation by placing swarms of 'nanoflares' at random sites and times in modeled…

The nanoflare paradigm of coronal heating has proven extremely promising for explaining the presence of hot, multi-million degree loops in the solar corona. In this paradigm, localized heating events supply enough energy to heat the solar…

One candidate-model for heating the solar corona is magnetic reconnection that embodies Ohmic dissipation of current sheets. When numerous small-scaled magnetic reconnection occur, then it is possible to heat the corona. Due to the…

The Sun's corona is millions of degrees hotter than its 5,000 K photosphere. This heating enigma is typically addressed by invoking the deposition at coronal heights of non-thermal energy generated by the interplay between convection and…

The million degree plasma of the solar corona must be supplied by the underlying layers of the atmosphere. The mechanism and location of energy release, and the precise source of coronal plasma, remain unresolved. In earlier work we pursued…

The physical processes causing energy exchange between the Sun's hot corona and its cool lower atmosphere remain poorly understood. The chromosphere and transition region (TR) form an interface region between the surface and the corona that…

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…

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude…

The solar coronal heating problem refers to the question why the temperature of the Sun's corona is more than two orders of magnitude higher than that of its surface. Almost 70 years after the discovery, this puzzle is still one of the…

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…