Thermodynamic properties of small flares in the quiet Sun observed by Hα and EUV: plasma motion of the chromosphere and time evolution of temperature/emission measure

Abstract

ABSTRACT Small flares frequently occur in the quiet Sun. Previous studies have noted that they share many common characteristics with typical solar flares in active regions. However, their similarities and differences are not fully understood, especially their thermal properties. In this study, we performed imaging spectroscopic observations in the Hα line taken with the Solar Dynamics Doppler Imager on the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope (SMART/SDDI) at the Hida Observatory and imaging observations with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO/AIA). We analysed 25 cases of small flares in the quiet Sun over the thermal energy range of $10^{24}{\!-\!}10^{27}\, \mathrm{erg}$ , paying particular attention to their thermal properties. Our main results are as follows: (1) We observe a redshift together with line centre brightening in the Hα line associated with more than half of the small flares. (2) We employ differential emission measure analysis using AIA multitemperature (channel) observations to obtain the emission measure and temperature of the small flares. The results are consistent with the Shibata & Yokoyama (1999, 2002) scaling law. From the scaling law, we estimated the coronal magnetic field strength of small flares to be 5–15 G. (3) The temporal evolution of the temperature and the density shows that the temperature peaks precede the density peaks in more than half of the events. These results suggest that chromospheric evaporations/condensations play an essential role in the thermal properties of some of the small flares in the quiet Sun, as does for large flares.