An Ab Initio Approach to the Solar Coronal Heating Problem

By B. Gudiksen, Åke Nordlund. 2004

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an ab initio approach to the solar coronal heating problem by modeling a small part of the solar corona in a computational box using a three-dimensional MHD code including realistic physics. The observed solar granular velocity pattern and its amplitude and vorticity power spectra, as reproduced by a weighted Voronoi tessellation method, are used as a boundary condition that generates a Poynting flux in the presence of a magnetic field. The initial magnetic field is a potential extrapolation of a SOHO/MDI high-resolution magnetogram, and a standard stratified atmosphere is used as a thermal initial condition. Except for the chromospheric temperature structure, which is kept nearly fixed, the initial conditions are quickly forgotten because the included Spitzer conductivity and radiative cooling function have typical timescales much shorter than the time span of the simulation. After a short initial start-up period, the magnetic field is able to dissipate (3-4) × 106 ergs cm-2 s-1 in a highly intermittent corona, maintaining an average temperature of ~106 K, at coronal density values for which simulated images of the TRACE 171 and 195 Å passbands reproduce observed photon count rates.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3f3d231034c1e3c604516423bf60a837f03a427

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. G. Aulanier
2. P. Démoulin
3. C. Schrijver
4. Etienne Pariat
5. S. Cranmer
6. B. de Pontieu
7. A. Title
8. J. Leenaarts

Citations in the corpus

• EXTENSION OF THE MURAM RADIATIVE MHD CODE FOR CORONAL SIMULATIONS (2016, background): “Comprehensive numerical simulations of the solar corona have been developed by a few teams in the past decade (Gudiksen & Nordlund 2002, 2005b,a; Abbett 2007; Gudiksen et al. 2011; Bingert & Peter 2011, 2013; Bourdin et al. 2013; Chen et al. 2014).”
• OBSERVING THE ROOTS OF SOLAR CORONAL HEATING—IN THE CHROMOSPHERE (2009, background): “Conceptually, our findings are compatible with results from numerical simulations (Gudiksen & Nordlund 2005; Hansteen et al. 2007) that suggest that most of the heating in the solar atmosphere occurs below heights of 2 Mm, i.e., at chromospheric heights.”
• The Solar Optical Telescope for the Hinode Mission: An Overview (2007, background): “…important for the quiet sun (Khomenko et al., 2005), for emerging flux (Cheung, Schüssler, and Moreno-Insertis, 2007), for chromospheric waves (Skartlien, Stein, and Nordlund, 2000), and for corona-chromospheric connections (Hansteen et al., 2006; Abbett, 2006; Gudiksen and Nordlund, 2005).”
• On Solving the Coronal Heating Problem (2005, methodology): “Some existing MHD models do include field-aligned thermal conduction (e.g., Lionello, Linker, and Mikić, 2001; Yokoyama and Shibata, 2001; Gudiksen and Nordlund, 2002, 2005a,b), but they do not yet adequately resolve the transition region.”
• Current sheet formation in quasi-separatrix layers and hyperbolic flux tubes (2005, background): “Recently, Gudiksen & Nordlund (2005) have performed MHD simulations of turbulent flux braiding in a potential field that was extrapolated from an observed magnetogram.”
• The magnetic field in the solar atmosphere (2014, unknown): “is a measure of how often different field lines cross each other in space Berger and Asgari-Targhi 2009 and is supported by MHD models (Gudiksen and Nordlund 2005; Rappazzo et al. 2008; van Ballegooijen et al. 2011).”
• The Solar Orbiter mission (2020, methodology): “Based on 3D magnetohydrodynamics, these models provide insight into the complex energy transport within the magnetically closed structures (Gudiksen & Nordlund 2002, 2005b,a; Bingert & Peter 2011; Rempel 2017) and can provide explanations for a number of observational findings, such as systematic…”
• A publicly available simulation of an enhanced network region of the Sun (2015, background): “The Joule heating in the simulation at heights from the upper photosphere to the corona scales roughly with the magnetic energy density, B2/(2µ0) (Hansteen et al. 2010; Gudiksen & Nordlund 2005).”
• HEATING OF THE SOLAR CHROMOSPHERE AND CORONA BY ALFVÉN WAVE TURBULENCE (2011, background): “However, except for the work by Gudiksen & Nordlund (2005), the above-mentioned models do not attempt to describe the real structure and dynamics of the photospheric magnetic field.”
• Axisymmetric magnetic fields in stars: relative strengths of poloidal and toroidal components (2008, methodology): “The code used is theSTAGGER CODE(Nordlund & Galsgaard 1995, Gudiksen & Nordlund 2005), a high-order finite-difference Cartesian MHD code which uses a ‘hyper-diffusion’ scheme, a system whereby diffusivities are scaled with the length scales present so that badly resolved structure near the Nyquist…”
• Making the Corona and the Fast Solar Wind: A Self-consistent Simulation for the Low-Frequency Alfvén Waves from the Photosphere to 0.3 AU (2005, methodology): “Our aim is to answer the problem of the heating and acceleration in the coronal holes by the forward approach (Gudiksen & Nordlund 2005).”
• The Magnetic Connection between the Convection Zone and Corona in the Quiet Sun (2007, background): “Although Gudiksen & Nordlund (2002, 2005) have recently performed relatively large-scale, realistic simulations of the solar corona driven by a stochastic approximation of granulation, to date, realistic three-dimensional MHD models of surface magnetoconvection have yet to include the upper…”
• MULTISPECTRAL EMISSION OF THE SUN DURING THE FIRST WHOLE SUN MONTH: MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS (2008, methodology): “Threedimensional models of active regions that include these effects have also been performed (Gudiksen & Nordlund 2005b, 2005a; Mok et al. 2008).”