The Relationship Between Solar Coronal X-Ray Brightness and Active Region Magnetic Fields: A Study Using High-Resolution Hinode Observations |
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Soumitra Hazra Submitted: 2015-03-02 05:03
By using high-resolution observations of nearly co-temporal and co-spatial Solar
Optical Telescope spectropolarimeter and X-Ray Telescope coronal X-ray data onboard Hinode, we revisit the problematic relationship between global magnetic quantities and coronal
X-ray brightness. Co-aligned vector magnetogram and X-ray data were used for this study.
The total X-ray brightness over active regions is well correlated with integrated magnetic
quantities such as the total unsigned magnetic flux, the total unsigned vertical current, and
the area-integrated square of the vertical and horizontal magnetic fields. On accounting for
the inter-dependence of the magnetic quantities, we inferred that the total magnetic flux is
the primary determinant of the observed integrated X-ray brightness. Our observations indicate that a stronger coronal X-ray flux is not related to a higher non-potentiality of active-
region magnetic fields. The data even suggest a slightly negative correlation between X-ray
brightness and a proxy of active-region non-potentiality. Although there are small numerical
differences in the established correlations, the main conclusions are qualitatively consistent
over two different X-ray filters, the Al-poly and Ti-poly filters, which confirms the strength
of our conclusions and validate and extend earlier studies that used low-resolution data.
We discuss the implications of our results and the constraints they set on theories of solar
coronal heating.
Authors: Soumitra Hazra, Dibyendu Nandy, B Ravindra
Projects: Hinode/SOT,Hinode/XRT
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Publication Status: 2015, Solar Physics, 290, 771
Last Modified: 2015-03-02 09:52
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