HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION OBSERVATIONS OF LOOPS IN THE SOLAR CORONA
- College of Science, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030 (United States)
- Space Science Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375 (United States)
- NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, ZP 13, Huntsville, AL 35812 (United States)
Understanding how the solar corona is structured is of fundamental importance to determine how the Sun's upper atmosphere is heated to high temperatures. Recent spectroscopic studies have suggested that an instrument with a spatial resolution of 200 km or better is necessary to resolve coronal loops. The High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) achieved this performance on a rocket flight in 2012 July. We use Hi-C data to measure the Gaussian widths of 91 loops observed in the solar corona and find a distribution that peaks at about 270 km. We also use Atmospheric Imaging Assembly data for a subset of these loops and find temperature distributions that are generally very narrow. These observations provide further evidence that loops in the solar corona are often structured at a scale of several hundred kilometers, well above the spatial scale of many proposed physical mechanisms.
- OSTI ID:
- 22140327
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 772, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 2041-8205
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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