Speaker
Description
Despite its extremely high temperature, the Solar corona features many cooler structures, like prominences and coronal rain. The root cause of the formation of cool and dense plasma is a thermal runaway effect, in which the plasma density increases in response to a decrease in temperature due to radiative cooling, in turn enhancing the radiative cooling effect again. This thermal instability can be triggered when a combination of radiative cooling, heating, and thermal conduction modifies the stable entropy mode into an unstable thermal continuum of highly localised modes. Performing a linear stability analysis, we show how the thermal continuum arises in a stratified atmosphere and 1D coronal loops, as well as how it is replaced with a quasi-continuum in a resistive medium and interacts with tearing instabilities in a current sheet. For the latter configuration, we simulate how the coupled tearing-thermal evolution behaves non-linearly.
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