Temporal and Spatial Fluctuations in Widths of solar Euv Lines

Abstract

Analyses of some 300 hours of time sequences of solar EUV line profiles obtained with 0S0-8 show large fluctuations in line widths. At a given location on the sun, line widths fluctuate temporally on time scales ranging from less than a minute to over an hour. At any given time, line widths fluctuate spatially on a variety of scales ranging from active region size to arc second size. Temporal and spatial fluctuations are of approximately the same amplitude. Thus, the sun can be characterized by an aggregate of small cells in each of which line widths are fluctuating in time and which have random phases with respect to each other.

Spatial fluctuations in line width are correlated with large scale spatial fluctuations in brightness for some lines but not for others. Temporal fluctuations in width are sometimes correlated with either Doppler shifts or intensity fluctuations, but more often such correlations are absent.

For a given line, the line width varies through an extreme range of about a factor of two. Nonthermal components of line width vary from approximately the local sound speed to a small fraction of the sound speed.