Magnetic fields and coronal heating

Abstract

General considerations concerning the scaling properties of magnetic-field-related coronal heating mechanisms are used to build a two-parameter model for the heating of closed coronal regions. The model predicts the way in which coronal temperature and electron density are related to photospheric magnetic field strength and the size of the region, using the additional constraint provided by the scaling law of Rosner, Tucker, and Vaiana. The model duplicates the observed scaling of total thermal energy content with total longitudinal flux; it also predicts a relation between the coronal energy density (or pressure) and the longitudinal field strength modified by the region scale size.