IRIS views Nano-Flares on the Sun

  • Released Monday, September 21st, 2020
  • Updated Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 12:11AM
  • ID: 4766

Opening full-disk solar view from AIA 304 angstroms, zooming in and fading in IRIS SJI at 1400 angstroms.

Nanoflares, energy releases powered by small magnetic reconnection events in the solar coronal loops, have long been hypothesized as one of the sources for heating the solar corona to million-degree temperatures. Much of the evidence for this has been indirect, and difficult to distinguish from other hypothesized mechanisms.

In these visualizations, we present observational evidence of the IRIS imager detecting nanoflares in a coronal loop. In the IRIS imager, overlaid on AIA 304 angstrom imagery, the events stand out as jet-like protrusions roughly perpendicular to the curve of the coronal loop.

In this data, we see several strong nano-flare events near the 14:43 timestamp.

Opening full-disk solar view from AIA 171 angstroms, zooming in (but not showing) on the IRIS SJI field-of-view.

Opening full-disk solar view from AIA 304 angstroms, zooming in (but not showing) on the IRIS SJI field-of-view.

Opening close-up solar view from of SDO/AIA 304 angstroms with an inset of IRIS SJI 1400 angstroms. Camera slides to the right (making the inset slide to the left). These were source frames for some special composites and included here in case others may find them useful.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Papers

This visualization is based on the following papers:

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

SDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER 2014-04-03T12:34UT - 2014-04-03T14:53UT

Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/

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SDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER 2014-04-03T12:34UT - 2014-04-03T14:53UT

Dataset can be found at: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/

See more visualizations using this data set
IRIS Slit-Jaw Imager (A.K.A. SJI) (Collected with the Imager sensor)
Observed Data LMSAL 2014-04-03T13:16UT - 2014-04-03T14:53UT

Dataset can be found at: https://iris.lmsal.com/data.html

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Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.