Related papers: Temperature inversion in a gravitationally bound p…
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…
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…
Temperature inversions occur in nature, e.g., in the solar corona and in interstellar molecular clouds: somewhat counterintuitively, denser parts of the system are colder than dilute ones. We propose a simple and appealing way to…
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…
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…
The solar atmosphere shows anomalous variation in temperature, starting from the 5500 K photosphere to the million-degree Kelvin corona. The corona itself expands into the interstellar medium as the free streaming solar wind, which…
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…
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…
I propose a new paradigm for solar coronal heating viewed as a self-regulating process keeping the plasma marginally collisionless. The mechanism is based on the coupling between two effects. First, coronal density controls the plasma…
All but the most massive main-sequence stars are expected to have a rarefied and hot (million-Kelvin) corona like the Sun. How such a hot corona is formed and supported has not been completely understood yet, even in the case of the Sun.…
Coronal loops trace out bipolar, arch-like magnetic fields above the Sun's surface. Recent measurements that combine rotational tomography, extreme ultraviolet imaging, and potential-field extrapolation have shown the existence of large…
The evolution of a coronal loop is studied by means of numerical simulations of the fully compressible three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic equations using the HYPERION code. The footpoints of the loop magnetic field are advected by random…
The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, contains plasma at temperatures of more than a million K, more than 100 times hotter that solar surface. How this gas is heated is a fundamental question tightly interwoven with the structure of the…
Non-thermal power-law distribution functions are ubiquitous in astrophysical, space, and laboratory kinetic plasmas, but their origin remains unclear. A related puzzle is the temperature inversion of the solar corona. We show that these…
The solar corona has been revealed in the past decade to be a highly dynamic nonequilibrium plasma environment. Both the loop-filled coronal base and the extended acceleration region of the solar wind appear to be strongly turbulent, but…
We report on the results of four convective dynamo simulations with an outer coronal layer. The magnetic field is self-consistently generated by the convective motions beneath the surface. Above the convection zone, we include a polytropic…
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…
Recent observations revealed that the solar atmosphere is highly structured in density, temperature and magnetic field. The presence of these gradients may lead to the appearance of currents in the plasma, which in the weakly collisional…
Measuring the temperature structure of the solar atmosphere is critical to understanding how it is heated to high temperatures. Unfortunately, the temperature of the upper atmosphere cannot be observed directly, but must be inferred from…
Temperature inversion due to velocity filtration, a mechanism originally proposed to explain the heating of the solar corona, is demonstrated to occur also in a simple paradigmatic model with long-range interactions, the Hamiltonian…