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The solar corona is much hotter than the photosphere and chromosphere, but the physical mechanism responsible for heating the coronal plasma remains unidentified yet. The thermal microwave emission, which is produced in strong magnetic…
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…
Magnetic energy is required to heat the corona, the outer atmosphere of the Sun, to millions of degrees. We study the nature of the magnetic energy source that is probably responsible for the brightening of coronal loops driven by…
The Sun's corona, heated to temperatures exceeding one million Kelvin despite lying above the cooler photosphere, has puzzled astrophysicists since its discovery in the 1940s. Prevailing theories, based on acoustic and magnetohydrodynamic…
A large part of the hot corona consists of magnetically confined, bright plasma loops. These observed loops are in turn structured into bright strands. We investigate the relationship between magnetic field geometry, plasma properties and…
Cool stars like our Sun are surrounded by a million degree hot outer atmosphere, the corona. Since more than 60 years the physical nature of the processes heating the corona to temperatures well in excess of those on the stellar surface…
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…
Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves and/or the braiding of magnetic field lines are largely thought to be responsible for heating the solar corona, both being mechanisms which are driven by the Sun's photospheric magnetic field. Recent…
Two of the most important features of the solar atmosphere are its hot, smooth coronal loops and the concentrations of magnetic shear, known as filament channels, that reside above photospheric polarity inversion lines (PILs). The shear…
A theory for the heating of coronal magnetic flux ropes is developed. The dissipated magnetic energy has two distinct contributions: (1) energy injected into the corona as a result of granule-scale, random footpoint motions, and (2) energy…
One of the greatest challenges in solar physics is understanding the heating of the Sun's corona. Most theories for coronal heating postulate that free energy in the form of magnetic twist/stress is injected by the photosphere into the…
Solar corona is much hotter than lower layers of the solar atmosphere-photosphere and chromosphere. The coronal temperature is up to 1MK in quiet sun areas, while up to several MK in active regions, which implies a key role of magnetic…
The physical processes that heat the solar corona and accelerate the solar wind remain unknown after many years of study. Some have suggested that the wind is driven by waves and turbulence in open magnetic flux tubes, and others have…
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…
Alfven waves created by sub-photospheric motions or by magnetic reconnection in the low solar atmosphere seem good candidates for coronal heating. However, the corona is also likely to be heated more directly by magnetic reconnection, with…
We model a coronal loop as a three-dimensional magnetic cylinder in a realistic solar atmosphere that extends from the chromosphere to the corona. Kink oscillations, believed ubiquitous in the solar corona, are launched in the loop. Heating…
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…
We present the first model that couples the formation of the corona of a solar active region to a model of the emergence of a sunspot pair. This allows us to study when, where, and why active region loops form, and how they evolve. We use a…
The EUI instrument on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the most stable, high-resolution images of the solar corona from its orbit with a perihelion near 0.4 AU. A sequence of 360 images obtained at 17.1 nm, between 25-Oct-2022…
The coronal heating problem is one of the most critical challenges in solar physics. Recent observations have revealed that small-scale swirls are ubiquitous in the photosphere and chromosphere, suggesting that they may play a significant…