Static and Impulsive Models of Solar Active Regions

Abstract

The physical modeling of active regions (ARs) and of the global corona is receiving increasing interest lately. Recent attempts to model ARs using static equilibrium models were quite successful in reproducing AR images of hot soft X-ray (SXR) loops. They however failed to predict the bright extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) warm loops permeating ARs: the synthetic images were dominated by intense footpoint emission. We demonstrate that this failure is due to the very weak dependence of loop temperature on loop length which cannot simultaneously account for both hot and warm loops in the same AR. We then consider time-dependent AR models based on nanoflare heating. We demonstrate that such models can simultaneously reproduce EUV and SXR loops in ARs. Moreover, they predict radial intensity variations consistent with the localized core and extended emissions in SXR and EUV AR observations, respectively. We finally show how the AR morphology can be used as a gauge of the properties (duration, energy, spatial dependence, and repetition time) of the impulsive heating.