Context.
Oscillations are abundant in the solar corona. Coronal loop oscillations are typically studied using highly idealised models of magnetic flux tubes. In order to improve our understanding of ...coronal oscillations, it is necessary to consider the effect of a realistic magnetic field topology and the density structuring.
Aims.
We analyse the damping of coronal oscillations using a self-consistent 3D radiation-magnetohydrodynamics simulation of the solar atmosphere spanning from the convection zone into the corona, the associated oscillation dissipation and heating, and finally, the physical processes that cause the damping and dissipation. The simulated corona that forms in this model does not depend on any prior assumptions about the shape of the coronal loops.
Methods.
We analysed the evolution of a bundle of magnetic loops by tracing the magnetic field.
Results.
We find that the bundle of magnetic loops shows damped transverse oscillations in response to perturbations in two separate instances, with oscillation periods of 177 s and 191 s, velocity amplitudes of 10 km s
−1
and 16 km s
−1
, and damping times of 176 s and 198 s. The coronal oscillations lead to the development of velocity shear in the simulated corona, which results in the formation of vortices seen in the velocity field that are caused by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. This contributes to the damping and dissipation of the transverse oscillations.
Conclusions.
The oscillation parameters and evolution we observed are in line with the values that are typically seen in observations of coronal loop oscillations. The dynamic evolution of the coronal loop bundle suggests that the models of monolithic and static coronal loops with constant lengths might need to be re-evaluated by relaxing the assumption of highly idealised wave guides.
Context.
Coronal rain consists of cool and dense plasma condensations formed in coronal loops as a result of thermal instability.
Aims.
Previous numerical simulations of thermal instability and ...coronal rain formation have relied on the practice of artificially adding a coronal heating term to the energy equation. To reproduce large-scale characteristics of the corona, the use of more realistic coronal heating prescription is necessary.
Methods.
We analysed coronal rain formation and evolution in a three-dimensional radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation spanning from convection zone to corona which is self-consistently heated by magnetic field braiding as a result of convective motions.
Results.
We investigate the spatial and temporal evolution of energy dissipation along coronal loops which become thermally unstable. Ohmic dissipation in the model leads to the heating events capable of inducing sufficient chromospheric evaporation into the loop to trigger thermal instability and condensation formation. The cooling of the thermally unstable plasma occurs on timescales that are comparable to the duration of the individual impulsive heating events. The impulsive heating has sufficient duration to trigger thermal instability in the loop but does not last long enough to lead to coronal rain limit cycles. We show that condensations can either survive and fall into the chromosphere or be destroyed by strong bursts of Joule heating associated with a magnetic reconnection events. In addition, we find that condensations can also form along open magnetic field lines.
Conclusions.
We modelled, for the first time, coronal rain formation in a self-consistent 3D radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation, in which the heating occurs mainly through the braiding and subsequent Ohmic dissipation of the magnetic field. The heating is stratified enough and lasts for long enough along specific field lines to produce the necessary chromospheric evaporation that triggers thermal instability in the corona.
Aims.
We examine the movements of mass elements within dense fibrils using passive tracer particles (corks) in order to understand the creation and destruction processes of fibrils.
Methods.
...Simulated fibrils were selected at times when they were visible in a H
α
image proxy. The corks were selected within fibril H
α
formation regions. From this set, we selected a cork and constructed the field line passing through it. Other fibrilar corks close to this field line were also selected and pathlines were constructed, revealing the locations of the mass elements forwards and backwards in time. Finally, we analysed the forces acting on these mass elements.
Results.
The main process of fibrilar loading in the simulation is different to the mass loading scenario in which waves steepen into shocks and push material upwards along the field lines from locations near their footpoints. The twisted, low-lying field lines were destabilised and then they untwisted, lifting the material trapped above their apexes via the Lorentz force. Subsequently, the majority of the mass drained down the field lines towards one or both footpoints under the influence of gravity. Material with large horizontal velocities could also be elevated in rising field lines, creating somewhat parabolic motions, but the material was not generally moving upward along a stationary magnetic field line during loading.
Conclusions.
The processes observed in the simulation are additional scenarios that are plausible. The criteria for observing such events are described in this work. We note that it is desirable for our simulations to also be able to form more densely packed fibrils from material fed from the base of field footpoints. The experimental parameters required to achieve this are also discussed in this paper.
Context.
Magnetic flux emergence from the solar interior has been shown to be a key mechanism for unleashing a wide variety of phenomena. However, there are still open questions concerning the rise ...of the magnetized plasma through the atmosphere, mainly in the chromosphere, where the plasma departs from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) and is partially ionized.
Aims.
We aim to investigate the impact of the nonequilibrium (NEQ) ionization and recombination and molecule formation of hydrogen, as well as ambipolar diffusion, on the dynamics and thermodynamics of the flux emergence process.
Methods.
Using the radiation-magnetohydrodynamic Bifrost code, we performed 2.5D numerical experiments of magnetic flux emergence from the convection zone up to the corona. The experiments include the NEQ ionization and recombination of atomic hydrogen, the NEQ formation and dissociation of H
2
molecules, and the ambipolar diffusion term of the generalized Ohm’s law.
Results.
Our experiments show that the LTE assumption substantially underestimates the ionization fraction in most of the emerged region, leading to an artificial increase in the ambipolar diffusion and, therefore, in the heating and temperatures as compared to those found when taking the NEQ effects on the hydrogen ion population into account. We see that LTE also overestimates the number density of H
2
molecules within the emerged region, thus mistakenly magnifying the exothermic contribution of the H
2
molecule formation to the thermal energy during the flux emergence process. We find that the ambipolar diffusion does not significantly affect the amount of total unsigned emerged magnetic flux, but it is important in the shocks that cross the emerged region, heating the plasma on characteristic times ranging from 0.1 to 100 s. We also briefly discuss the importance of including elements heavier than hydrogen in the equation of state so as not to overestimate the role of ambipolar diffusion in the atmosphere.
Estimation of the sky signal from sequences of time ordered data is one of the key steps in cosmic microwave background (CMB) data analysis, commonly referred to as the map-making problem. Some of ...the most popular and general methods proposed for this problem involve solving generalised least-squares (GLS) equations with non-diagonal noise weights given by a block-diagonal matrix with Toeplitz blocks. In this work, we study new map-making solvers potentially suitable for applications to the largest anticipated data sets. They are based on iterative conjugate gradient (CG) approaches enhanced with novel, parallel, two-level preconditioners. We apply the proposed solvers to examples of simulated non-polarised and polarised CMB observations and a set of idealised scanning strategies with sky coverage ranging from a nearly full sky down to small sky patches. We discuss their implementation for massively parallel computational platforms and their performance for a broad range of parameters that characterise the simulated data sets in detail. We find that our best new solver can outperform carefully optimised standard solvers used today by a factor of as much as five in terms of the convergence rate and a factor of up to four in terms of the time to solution, without significantly increasing the memory consumption and the volume of inter-processor communication. The performance of the new algorithms is also found to be more stable and robust and less dependent on specific characteristics of the analysed data set. We therefore conclude that the proposed approaches are well suited to address successfully challenges posed by new and forthcoming CMB data sets.
We report detection of oscillations in brightness temperature, size and horizontal velocity of three small bright features in the chromosphere of a plage/enhanced-network region. The observations, ...which were taken with high temporal resolution (i.e. 2 s cadence) with the Atacama large millimetre/ submillimetre array (ALMA) in Band 3 (centred at 3 mm; 100 GHz), exhibit three small-scale features with oscillatory behaviour with different, but overlapping, distributions of period on the order of, on average, 90 ± 22 s, 110 ± 12 s and 66 ± 23 s, respectively. We find anti-correlations between perturbations in brightness, temperature and size of the three features, which suggest the presence of fast sausage-mode waves in these small structures. In addition, the detection of transverse oscillations (although with a larger uncertainty) may also suggest the presence of Alfvénic oscillations which are likely representative of kink waves. This work demonstrates the diagnostic potential of high-cadence observations with ALMA for detecting high-frequency magnetohydrodynamic waves in the solar chromosphere. Such waves can potentially channel a vast amount of energy into the outer atmosphere of the Sun. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'High-resolution wave dynamics in the lower solar atmosphere'.
An overall view of temperature oscillations in the solar chromosphere with ALMA Jafarzadeh, S; Wedemeyer, S; Fleck, B ...
Philosophical transactions - Royal Society. Mathematical, Physical and engineering sciences/Philosophical transactions - Royal Society. Mathematical, physical and engineering sciences,
02/2021, Volume:
379, Issue:
2190
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
By direct measurements of the gas temperature, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has yielded a new diagnostic tool to study the solar chromosphere. Here, we present an overview ...of the brightness-temperature fluctuations from several high-quality and high-temporal-resolution (i.e. 1 and 2 s cadence) time series of images obtained during the first 2 years of solar observations with ALMA, in Band 3 and Band 6, centred at around 3 mm (100 GHz) and 1.25 mm (239 GHz), respectively. The various datasets represent solar regions with different levels of magnetic flux. We perform fast Fourier and Lomb-Scargle transforms to measure both the spatial structuring of dominant frequencies and the average global frequency distributions of the oscillations (i.e. averaged over the entire field of view). We find that the observed frequencies significantly vary from one dataset to another, which is discussed in terms of the solar regions captured by the observations (i.e. linked to their underlying magnetic topology). While the presence of enhanced power within the frequency range 3-5 mHz is found for the most magnetically quiescent datasets, lower frequencies dominate when there is significant influence from strong underlying magnetic field concentrations (present inside and/or in the immediate vicinity of the observed field of view). We discuss here a number of reasons which could possibly contribute to the power suppression at around 5.5 mHz in the ALMA observations. However, it remains unclear how other chromospheric diagnostics (with an exception of H
line-core intensity) are unaffected by similar effects, i.e. they show very pronounced 3-min oscillations dominating the dynamics of the chromosphere, whereas only a very small fraction of all the pixels in the 10 ALMA datasets analysed here show peak power near 5.5 mHz. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'High-resolution wave dynamics in the lower solar atmosphere'.
A dense forest of slender bright fibrils near a small solar active region is seen in high-quality narrowband Ca ii H images from the SuFI instrument onboard the Sunrise balloon-borne solar ...observatory. The orientation of these slender Ca ii H fibrils (SCF) overlaps with the magnetic field configuration in the low solar chromosphere derived by magnetostatic extrapolation of the photospheric field observed with Sunrise/IMaX and SDO/HMI. In addition, many observed SCFs are qualitatively aligned with small-scale loops computed from a novel inversion approach based on best-fit numerical MHD simulation. Such loops are organized in canopy-like arches over quiet areas that differ in height depending on the field strength near their roots.
Solar observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) provide us with direct measurements of the brightness temperature in the solar chromosphere. We study the temperature ...distributions obtained with ALMA Band 6 (in four sub-bands at 1.21, 1.22, 1.29, and 1.3 mm) for various areas at, and in the vicinity of, a sunspot, comprising quasi-quiet and active regions with different amounts of underlying magnetic fields. We compare these temperatures with those obtained at near- and far-ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths (and with the line-core intensities of the optically-thin far-UV spectra), co-observed with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) explorer. These include the emission peaks and cores of the Mg II k 279.6 nm and Mg II h 280.4 nm lines as well as the line cores of C II 133.4 nm, O I 135.6 nm, and Si IV 139.4 nm, sampling the mid-to-high chromosphere and the low transition region. Splitting the ALMA sub-bands resulted in an slight increase of spatial resolution in individual temperature maps, thus, resolving smaller-scale structures compared to those produced with the standard averaging routines. We find that the radiation temperatures have different, though somewhat overlapping, distributions in different wavelengths and in the various magnetic regions. Comparison of the ALMA temperatures with those of the UV diagnostics should, however, be interpreted with great caution, the former is formed under the local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) conditions, the latter under non-LTE. The mean radiation temperature of the ALMA Band 6 is similar to that extracted from the IRIS C II line in all areas with exception of the sunspot and pores where the C II poses higher radiation temperatures. In all magnetic regions, the Mg II lines associate with the lowest mean radiation temperatures in our sample. These will provide constraints for future numerical models.
The multi-thermal chromosphere J. M. da Silva Santos; J. de la Cruz Rodríguez; Leenaarts, J ...
Astronomy & astrophysics,
02/2020, Volume:
634
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Context. Numerical simulations of the solar chromosphere predict a diverse thermal structure with both hot and cool regions. Observations of plage regions in particular typically feature broader and ...brighter chromospheric lines, which suggests that they are formed in hotter and denser conditions than in the quiet Sun, but also implies a nonthermal component whose source is unclear. Aims. We revisit the problem of the stratification of temperature and microturbulence in plage and the quiet Sun, now adding millimeter (mm) continuum observations provided by the Atacama Large Millimiter Array (ALMA) to inversions of near-ultraviolet Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spectra as a powerful new diagnostic to disentangle the two parameters. We fit cool chromospheric holes and track the fast evolution of compact mm brightenings in the plage region. Methods. We use the STiC nonlocal thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) inversion code to simultaneously fit real ultraviolet and mm spectra in order to infer the thermodynamic parameters of the plasma. Results. We confirm the anticipated constraining potential of ALMA in NLTE inversions of the solar chromosphere. We find significant differences between the inversion results of IRIS data alone compared to the results of a combination with the mm data: the IRIS+ALMA inversions have increased contrast and temperature range, and tend to favor lower values of microturbulence (∼3−6 km s−1 in plage compared to ∼4−7 km s−1 from IRIS alone) in the chromosphere. The average brightness temperature of the plage region at 1.25 mm is 8500 K, but the ALMA maps also show much cooler (∼3000 K) and hotter (∼11 000 K) evolving features partially seen in other diagnostics. To explain the former, the inversions require the existence of localized low-temperature regions in the chromosphere where molecules such as CO could form. The hot features could sustain such high temperatures due to non-equilibrium hydrogen ionization effects in a shocked chromosphere – a scenario that is supported by low-frequency shock wave patterns found in the Mg II lines probed by IRIS.
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