IRIS Mg II Observations and Non-LTE Modeling of Off-limb Spicules

Abstract:

We investigated the off-limb spicules observed in the Mg II h and k spectral lines by Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) in a solar polar coronal hole. We analyzed the large data set of obtained spectra to extract quantitative information about the line intensities, line shifts, and line widths. The observed Mg II line profiles are broad and double peaked at lower altitudes, broad but flat topped at middle altitudes, and narrow and single peaked with the largest Doppler shifts at higher altitudes. We used one-dimensional non-LTE vertical slab models (i.e., models that consider departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium) in single-slab and multi-slab configurations to interpret the observations and to investigate how a superposition of spicules along a line of sight (LOS) affects the synthetic Mg II line profiles. The employed multi-slab models are either static, i.e., without any LOS velocities, or assume randomly assigned LOS velocities of individual slabs, representing the spicule dynamics. We performed such single-slab and multi-slab modeling for a broad set of model input parameters and examined the dependence of the Mg II line profiles on these parameters. In this presentation, we demonstrate that the observed line widths of the Mg h and k line profiles are strongly affected by the presence of multiple spicules along the LOS. We also show that the profiles obtained at higher altitudes can be reproduced by single-slab models representing individual spicules. We found that the multi-slab model with a random distribution of the LOS velocities ranging from −25 to 25 km/s can well reproduce the width and the shape of the Mg II profiles observed at middle altitudes.