The cooling of coronal plasmas. IV. Catastrophic cooling of loops
Date
20/07/2013Metadata
Show full item recordAltmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
We examine the radiative cooling of coronal loops and demonstrate that the recently identified catastrophic cooling is due to the inability of a loop to sustain radiative/enthalpy cooling below a critical temperature, which can be >1 MK in flares, 0.5-1 MK in active regions, and 0.1 MK in long tenuous loops. Catastrophic cooling is characterized by a rapid fall in coronal temperature, while the coronal density changes by a small amount. Analytic expressions for the critical temperature are derived and show good agreement with numerical results. This effect considerably limits the lifetime of coronal plasmas below the critical temperature.
Citation
Cargill , P J & Bradshaw , S J 2013 , ' The cooling of coronal plasmas. IV. Catastrophic cooling of loops ' , Astrophysical Journal , vol. 772 , no. 1 , 40 . https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/772/1/40
Publication
Astrophysical Journal
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0004-637XType
Journal article
Rights
© 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.