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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 5: Sun and heliosphere I

EP 5.2: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 11:15–11:45, ZEU/0160

New insights into the elusive magnetic processes operating in the solar corona with SolO/EUI — •Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta — Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen

The solar corona, million Kelvin hot outer atmosphere of the Sun, is governed by magnetic fields. Streams of charged particles continuously escape this hot atmosphere into the heliosphere as solar wind. Magnetic processes responsible for coronal heating and for powering the solar wind are a subject of active debate for over six decades. With its unprecedented high-resolution, high-cadence view of the Sun, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) onboard the Solar Orbiter mission is shedding new light on the elusive magnetic processes operating in the corona. At closest approach, EUI can provides data with a spatial resolution of about 200 km and a cadence of below 3 s. During the first science perihelion observing campaigns of Solar Orbiter, the EUI instrument imaged untangling of small-scale coronal magnetic braids through reconnection, and subsequent heating of plasma in some active region coronal loops. These observations suggest that magnetic reconnection in coronal loops might be operating on short timescales of a few 10 s and on spatial scales of a few 100 km. The EUI data also revealed ubiquitous high-speed reconnection-driven jets from coronal holes. These jets can channel sufficient heated material to sustain the solar wind mass flux. In this talk, we present these novel observations and discuss the role of magnetic reconnection in the heating of coronal plasma and in the driving of solar wind.