OBSERVATION OF ULTRAFINE CHANNELS OF SOLAR CORONA HEATING

Abstract

We report the first direct observations of dynamical events originating in the Sun's photosphere and subsequently lighting up the corona. Continuous small-scale, impulsive events have been tracked from their origin in the photosphere on through to their brightening of the local corona. We achieve this by combining high-resolution ground-based data from the 1.6 m aperture New Solar Telescope (NST) at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), and satellite data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The NST imaging observations in helium I 10830 angstrom reveal unexpected complexes of ultrafine, hot magnetic loops seen to be reaching from the photosphere to the base of the corona. Most of these ultrafine loops are characterized by an apparently constant, but surprisingly narrow diameter of about 100 km all along each loop, and the loops originate on the solar surface from intense, compact magnetic field elements. The NST observations detect the signature of upward injections of hot plasma that excite the ultrafine loops from the photosphere to the base of the corona. The ejecta have their individual footpoints in the intergranular lanes between the Sun's ubiquitous, convectively driven granules. In many cases, AIA/SDO detects cospatial and cotemporal brightenings in the overlying, million degree coronal loops in conjunction with the upward injections along the ultrafine loops. Segments of some of the more intense upward injections are seen as rapid blueshifted events in simultaneous Ha blue wing images observed at BBSO. In sum, the observations unambiguously show impulsive coronal heating events from upward energy flows originating from intergranular lanes on the solar surface accompanied by cospatial mass flows.