INVESTIGADORES
MANDRINI Cristina Hemilse
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Solar coronal loops and coronal heating models
Autor/es:
MANDRINI, C.H.
Lugar:
Angra dos Reis, Brasil
Reunión:
Conferencia; Magnetic fields in the Universe: From laboratory and stars to primordial structures; 2004
Institución organizadora:
Universidades de San Pablo, de Pisa y de Wisconsin
Resumen:
Ever since it was realized, some sixty five years ago, that the solar corona is three orders
of magnitude hotter than the underlying photosphere, scientists have puzzled over the reason for
these extreme conditions. A number of plausible ideas have been put forward, including the dissipation
of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves and the dissipation of stressed, current-carrying
magnetic fields. Unfortunately, the conversion of magnetic to thermal energy occurs on spatial scales
that are far smaller than can be observed directly by present-day solar instruments, and it has been
extremely difficult to identify the exact cause of the heating. We will describe two different approaches
we have undertaken combining soft X-ray coronal observations and photospheric magnetic
observations with other indirect means (e.g. magnetic field extrapolations, quasi-static loop
theory), to discriminate between the models that have been so far proposed to explain the coronal
heating problem. Both approaches show that models based on the dissipation of stressed, currentcarrying
magnetic fields are in better agreement with the observations than models that attribute
coronal heating to the dissipation of MHD waves injected at the base of the corona.