Authors: Alan Title, Karel Schrijver
Affiliation: Lockheed Martin, Advanced Technology Center
The Sun’s magnetic field is responsible for heating of the outer solar atmosphere. Thus it controls the Sun’s EUV, x-Ray, and ?-ray emission. Recent observations with the TRACE satellite show that the outer atmosphere is highly structured, dynamic, and multi-thermal. The combination of convection cells and large scale flows moves, mixes, and inserts magnetic feature. In this talk origin and scales of resulting magnetic configurations are examined. It now appears that small-scale localized fields interact with large-scale flux systems to feed energy from scales of 1000 km to 100,000 km and more. How scales of convection and magnetic fields interact my provide clues on the fundamental processes responsible for heating in astrophysical systems. The talk will be illustrated by visualizations of numerical simulations and observations from observatories on the ground and in space.