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Quantifying weak non-thermal meterwave solar emission using non-imaging techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2018

Rohit Sharma
Affiliation:
National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune, India email: [email protected]
Divya Oberoi
Affiliation:
National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune, India email: [email protected]
Akshay Suresh
Affiliation:
Cornell Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Ithlaca, New York, USA
Mihir Arjunwadkar
Affiliation:
Centre for Modeling and Simulation, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Ganeshkhind, Pune, India
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An improved understanding of the solar corona is crucial for making progress on long-standing problems like coronal heating and the origin of the solar wind. Metrewave radio emissions arise in the coronal regions and form a unique diagnostic probe of this, otherwise hard to study region. The background radio emission at these wavelengths comes from the slowly varying thermal free-free emission and on it are superposed a variety of nonthermal emissions arising from a range of plasma emission processes. The latter are coherent in nature and hence lead to a much larger observational contrast, as compared to that in EUV or X-ray, for emissions involving similar energetics. One of the prevalent hypotheses for explaining coronal heating is based on the presence of an energetically weak population of ‘nanoflares’ (Parker 1988). A necessary requirement for nanoflares based coronal heating to be effective is that their occurrence rate slopes must be <-2 (Hudson 1991). There is hence a lot of interest in studies of weak nonthermal emissions. Existing studies in EUV and X-ray bands have detected ‘microflares’ with slopes >-2 (e.g. Hannah et al. 2011). Some of the weak meterwave emissions detected are, however, believed to correspond to energies in the ‘picoflare’ range (Ramesh et al. 2013). It is hence, very interesting to study weak nonthermal emissions at metric wavelengths.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2018 

References

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