Observations of the Quiet Sun during the Deepest Solar Minimum of the Past Century with Chandrayaan-2 XSM: Sub-A-class Microflares outside Active Regions
| Autor: | Tinkal Ladiya, Sushil Kumar, Arpit R. Patel, Shiv Kumar Goyal, Mahesh P Shanmugam, Anil Bhardwaj, P. Janardhan, Hitesh Kumar L. Adalja, N. P. S. Mithun, Neeraj Kumar Tiwari, Biswajit Mondal, Aveek Sarkar, Nishant Singh, Santosh V. Vadawale, Bhuwan Joshi |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Solar minimum
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena FOS: Physical sciences Flux Astrophysics 01 natural sciences 0103 physical sciences Thermal Astrophysics::Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 010303 astronomy & astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) 0105 earth and related environmental sciences High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) Physics Solar flare Astronomy and Astrophysics Magnetic reconnection Plasma Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Orders of magnitude (time) Space and Planetary Science QUIET Physics::Space Physics Astrophysics::Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena |
| Zdroj: | The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 912:L13 |
| ISSN: | 2041-8213 2041-8205 |
| Popis: | Solar flares, with energies ranging over several orders of magnitude, result from impulsive release of energy due to magnetic reconnection in the corona. Barring a handful, almost all microflares observed in X-rays are associated with the solar active regions. Here we present, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of a large sample of quiet Sun microflares observed in soft X-rays by the Solar X-ray Monitor (XSM) on board the Chandrayaan-2 mission during the 2019-20 solar minimum. A total of 98 microflares having peak flux below GOES A-level were observed by the XSM during observations spanning 76 days. By using the derived plasma temperature and emission measure of these events obtained by fitting the XSM spectra along with volume estimates from concurrent imaging observations in EUV with the Solar Dynamics Observatory/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (SDO/AIA), we estimated their thermal energies to be ranging from 3e26 to 6e27 erg. We present the frequency distribution of the quiet Sun microflares with energy and discuss the implications of these observations of small-scale magnetic reconnection events outside active regions on coronal heating. Accepted for publication in ApJL; 13 pages, 5 figures; All figures of figure set 3 available in the tar file |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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