Coronal Heating Rate in the Slow Solar Wind
Abstract
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 Orbiter/Metis and the Parker Solar Probe instruments, respectively, and relies on the basic solar wind magnetohydrodynamic equations. As expected, energy losses are a minor fraction of the solar wind energy flux, since most of the energy dissipation that feeds the heating and acceleration of the coronal flow occurs much closer to the Sun than the heights probed in the present study, which range from 6.3 to 13.3 solar radii. The energy deposited to the supersonic wind is then used to explain the observed slight residual wind acceleration and to maintain the plasma in a non-adiabatic state. As derived in the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin limit, the present energy transfer rate estimates provide a lower limit, which can be very useful in refining the turbulence-based modeling of coronal heating and subsequent solar wind acceleration.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2306.10819,
title = {Coronal Heating Rate in the Slow Solar Wind},
author = {Daniele Telloni and Marco Romoli and Marco Velli and Gary P. Zank and Laxman Adhikari and Cooper Downs and Aleksandr Burtovoi and Roberto Susino and Daniele Spadaro and Lingling Zhao and Alessandro Liberatore and Chen Shi and Yara De Leo and Lucia Abbo and Federica Frassati and Giovanna Jerse and Federico Landini and Gianalfredo Nicolini and Maurizio Pancrazzi and Giuliana Russano and Clementina Sasso and Vincenzo Andretta and Vania Da Deppo and Silvano Fineschi and Catia Grimani and Petr Heinzel and John D. Moses and Giampiero Naletto and Marco Stangalini and Luca Teriaca and Michela Uslenghi and Arkadiusz Berlicki and Roberto Bruno and Gerardo Capobianco and Giuseppe E. Capuano and Chiara Casini and Marta Casti and Paolo Chioetto and Alain J. Corso and Raffaella D'Amicis and Michele Fabi and Fabio Frassetto and Marina Giarrusso and Silvio Giordano and Salvo L. Guglielmino and Enrico Magli and Giuseppe Massone and Mauro Messerotti and Giuseppe Nisticò and Maria G. Pelizzo and Fabio Reale and Paolo Romano and Udo Schühle and Sami K. Solanki and Thomas Straus and Rita Ventura and Cosimo A. Volpicelli and Luca Zangrilli and Gaetano Zimbardo and Paola Zuppella and Stuart D. Bale and Justin C. Kasper},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.10819},
year = {2023}
}