Abstract
The heating of the Sun's corona has been explained by several different
mechanisms including wave dissipation and magnetic reconnection. While both
have been shown capable of supplying the requisite power, neither has been used
in a quantitative model of observations fed by measured inputs. Here we show
that impulsive reconnection is capable of producing an active region corona
agreeing both qualitatively and quantitatively with extreme-ultraviolet
observations. We calculate the heating power proportional to the velocity
difference between magnetic footpoints and the photospheric plasma, called the
non-ideal velocity. The length scale of flux elements reconnected in the corona
is found to be around 160 km. The differential emission measure of the model
corona agrees with that derived using multi-wavelength images. Synthesized
extreme-ultraviolet images resemble observations both in their loop-dominated
appearance and their intensity histograms. This work provides compelling
evidence that impulsive reconnection events are a viable mechanism for heating
the corona.
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