Solar transient events and their importance for coronal heating.
Over the last decade, the uninterrupted high resolution coverage of the Sun both from the excellent range of telescopes aboard many spacecrafts and from ground-based instruments has led to a wealth of observations of small-scale dynamic events observed from the chromosphere to the transition region and corona. Since many of these events were observed with different instruments they show different properties from one another. It is suggested that many of these phenomena result from small-scale reconnection events due to the continually evolving magnetic fields as seen at the photospheric level, although waves are thought to play an important heating role as well. Nowadays, there is a general consensus that the key to understanding how the solar plasma is accelerated and heated may well be found in the study of these small-scale dynamic events. Here we give a brief review of the range of observed transient features and suggest that these small-scale events may well have broad implications for the mass and energy balance of the whole upper atmosphere of the Sun and the solar wind.
Doyle
J Gerry
JG
Armagh Observatory.
Madjarska
Maria S
MS