UV core dimming in coronal streamer belt and the projection effects

Abstract

During solar minimum activity, the coronal structure is dominated by a tilted streamer belt, associated with the sources of the slow solar wind. It is known that some UV coronal spectral observations show a quite evident core dimming in heavy ions emission in quiescent streamers. In this paper, our purpose is to investigate this phenomenon by comparing observed and simulated UV coronal ion spectral line intensities. First, we computed the emissivities and the intensities of HI Lyα and OVI spectral lines starting from the physical parameters of a time-dependent 3D three-fluid MHD model of the coronal streamer belt. The model is applied to a tilted dipole (10°) solar minimum magnetic structure. Next, we compared the results obtained from the model in the extended corona (from 1.5 to 4 R⊙) to the UV spectroscopic data from the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer (UVCS) onboard SOHO during the minimum of solar activity (1996). We investigate the line-of-sight integration and projection effects in the UV spectroscopic observations, disentangled by the 3D multifluid model. The results demonstrate that the core dimming in heavy ions is produced by the physical processes included in the model (i.e., combination of the effects of heavy ion gravitational settling, and energy exchange of the preferentially heated heavy ions through the interaction with electrons and protons) but it is visible only in some cases where the magnetic structure is simple, such as a (tilted) dipole.