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It is now well established that Alfvénic waves are ubiquitous in the solar corona. However, the Alfvénic wave energy estimated from Doppler velocity measurements in the corona was found to be four orders of magnitude less than that estimated from nonthermal line widths. McIntosh & De Pontieu suggested that this discrepancy in energy might be due to the line-of-sight (LOS) superposition of several oscillating structures, which can lead to an underestimation of the Alfvénic wave amplitudes and energies. McIntosh & De Pontieu termed this coronal “dark” or “hidden” energy. However, their simulations required the use of an additional, unknown source of Alfvénic wave energy to obtain agreement with measurements of the coronal nonthermal line widths. In this study, we investigate the requirement of this unknown source of additional “dark” energy in the solar corona using gravitationally stratified 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of propagating waves. We excite the transverse MHD waves and generate synthetic observations of the Fe xiii emission line. We establish that LOS superposition greatly reduces the Doppler velocity amplitudes and increases the nonthermal line widths. Importantly, our model generates the observed wedge-shape correlation between Doppler velocities and nonthermal line widths. We find that the observed wave energy is only 0.2%–1% of the true wave energy, which explains the 2–3 order-of-magnitude energy discrepancy. We conclusively establish that true wave energies are hidden in nonthermal line widths. Hence, our results rule out the requirement for an additional “dark” energy in the solar corona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propagating slow waves in coronal loops exhibit a damping that depends upon the frequency of the waves. In this study we aim to investigate the relationship of the damping length (Ld) with the frequency of the propagating wave. We present a 3D coronal loop model with uniform density and temperature and investigate the frequency-dependent damping mechanism for the four chosen wave periods. We include the thermal conduction to damp the waves as they propagate through the loop. The numerical model output has been forward modeled to generate synthetic images of SDO/AIA 171 and 193 Å channels. The use of forward modeling, which incorporates the atomic emission properties into the intensity images, allows us to directly compare our results with the real observations. The results show that the damping lengths vary linearly with the periods. We also measure the contributions of the emission properties on the damping lengths by using density values from the simulation. In addition to that we have also calculated the theoretical dependence of Ld with wave periods and showed that it is consistent with the results we obtained from the numerical modeling and earlier observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]