Spatial and Temporal Properties of Hot and Cool Coronal Loops

Abstract

A suite of images from the XUV Doppler Telescope (XDT), the Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), and the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) allow us to see the whole (T > 1 MK) temperature evolution of coronal loops. The detailed morphological comparison of an active region shows that hot loops seen in SXT (T > 3 MK) and cool loops seen in the the EIT 195 A band (T ~ 1.5 MK) are located in almost alternating manner. The anticoincidence of the hot and the cool loops is conserved for a duration much longer than the estimated cooling timescale. However, both hot and cool loops have counterparts in the intermediate-temperature images. The cross-correlation coefficients are higher for neighboring temperature pairs and lower for pairs with larger temperature differences. These results suggest that loops are not isothermal but rather have a differential emission measure distribution of modest but finite width that peaks at different temperatures for different loops.