Signatures of photospheric convection throughout the solar atmosphere: the EVE Sun-as-a-star mHz continuum

Abstract

Convectively driven motions in the solar photosphere can generate broadband Doppler variability across the chromosphere, transition region and corona. Here we investigate this variability using &#34;Sun-as-a-Star&#34; observations from the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory, constructing high signal-to-noise Doppler power spectra from incoherently summed 3-hour sequences of the centroid wavelengths of emission lines that span wavelengths 35-104 nm. The spectra reveal a broad power-spectral continuum with two Harvey-like components, one of which extends to the Nyquist frequency at 50 mHz with a steep power-law tail. Lines formed in the corona, as compared with those of the chromosphere/transition region, have substantially less Doppler amplitude in the 5 mHz Harvey component associated with granulation-scale convection. Based on the observed continuum, there is no evidence (in any of the 26 lines studied) for Kolmogorov turbulence, which predicts a flat continuum component with Doppler variance <v^2> ~ f^{-5/3) as a function of frequency f. The total inferred non-thermal RMS velocities (>0.1 mHz) are of order 15 km/s, consistent with previous coronal &#34;microturbulence&#34; estimates from non-thermal line widths. These observations provide the first clear detection of Sun-as-a-star EUV Doppler variability above about 10 mHz and demonstrate the potential of full-disk EUV spectroscopy to probe turbulent energy transport throughout the solar atmosphere.