Simultaneous SOHO andYohkoh Observations of a Small Solar Active Region

Abstract

We present new results from observations of a small active region taken with the SUMER spectrograph and Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on SOHO and with the Soft X-Ray Telescope (SXT) on Yohkoh. The SUMER study features line and continuum emission covering a wide range of temperatures and includes the density-sensitive O IV] λ1400 multiplet. A more extensive analysis of quiet Sun data presented in a previous paper is also included. The presence of a power-law relationship between emission-line power and electron density is confirmed, although the exponents in the active region are slightly higher than those found in the quiet Sun. These power-law relationships suggest that the volume filling factor decreases with increasing density and indicate possible differences between emitting material in active regions and the quiet Sun. We study active-region emission measures from both the SUMER and SXT data sets. For the active region as a whole, SXT temperatures and emission measures appear to fit smoothly onto the emission-measure distribution determined from cooler transition region and coronal lines in the SUMER spectra. We find no significant variation in the shape of the lower transition region emission-measure distribution for different subregions of the data set. This reinforces the conclusion from the original quiet Sun paper that ensembles of ``cool loops'' are unlikely to be the source of this emission unless the structures are considerably smaller than the 1" spatial resolution of SUMER.