What are nanoflares?
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$2 Answers
Two active regions shown as bright areas on this image of the sun, taken with Japan´s Hinode X-Ray Telescope.
Nanoflares are small bursts of heat and energy in the sun's atmosphere which cause temperatures to reach millions of degrees.
The sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is made up of loops of hot gas that arch high above the surface. These loops are comprised of bundles of smaller, individual magnetic tubes or strands that can have temperatures reaching several millions of degrees, while the surface of the Sun is merely thousands of degrees.
Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of energy that happen within these thin magnetic tubes in the corona. Unlike solar flares, which can be viewed through satellites and ground-based telescopes, nanoflares are so small that they cannot be resolved individually. We only see the combined effect of many of them occurring at about the same time.
Cross section explanatory diagram of the Sun´s "Coupling from the photosphere to the chromosphere and the corona".
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Reconnecting current sheets (RCS) are considered to be the
main energy release mechanism in solar and stellar active
regions. Active regions are highly inhomogeneous, complex
dynamical systems enclosing a large number of magnetic
loops, randomly interacting in many independent places, and
forming numerous current sheets with sizes varying over a
wide range. Random photospheric motions shuffle and move
the bases of the loops, adding complexity to the system. It
seems that there is a critical threshold of marginal stability
above which current sheets are canceled because of magnetic
reconnection, in this way releasing energy in random places
and making their neighborhood more probable to release
energy as well. Depending on the sizes and the numbers of
current sheets involved in an event, we may observe large
energetic events (flares) and significantly weaker flaring activity
(microflares). It has been proposed (Parker 1988) that even
smaller energetic events, presently undetectable, extend below
the observational limit of 1025 ergs. These extremely weak
events are, in general, very short and have been named
nanoflares.
Observations of flaring activity show that the peak-luminosity
distribution of flares and microflares obeys a well-formed
extended power law with an index 21.80 H 0.05 (Lin et al.
1984; Dennis 1985; Crosby, Aschwanden, & Dennis 1992;
Pearce, Rowe, & Yeung 1993).Nanoflares cause Sun's atmosphere to heat up by millions of degrees
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
