SH13B-2440
Hard X-ray Detectability of Small Impulsive Heating Events in the Solar Corona
Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Lindsay Glesener1, James A Klimchuk2, Stephen J. Bradshaw3, Andrew Marsh4, Sam Krucker1 and Steven Christe5, (1)University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Houston, TX, United States, (4)University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, (5)NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
Impulsive heating events (“nanoflares”) are a candidate to supply the solar corona with its ~2 MK temperature. These transient events can be studied using extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray observations, among others. However, the impulsive events may occur in tenuous loops on small enough timescales that the heating is essentially not observed due to ionization timescales, and only the cooling phase is observed. Bremsstrahlung hard X-rays could serve as a more direct and prompt indicator of transient heating events. A hard X-ray spacecraft based on the direct-focusing technology pioneered by the Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) sounding rocket could search for these direct signatures. In this work, we use the hydrodynamical EBTEL code to simulate differential emission measures produced by individual heating events and by ensembles of such events. We then directly predict hard X-ray spectra and consider their observability by a future spaceborne FOXSI, and also by the RHESSI and NuSTAR spacecraft.
