THE CORONAL LOOP INVENTORY PROJECT

Most coronal physicists now seem to agree that loops are composed of tangled magnetic strands and have both isothermal and multithermal cross-field temperature distributions. As yet, however, there is no information on the relative importance of each of these categories, and we do not know how common one is with respect to the other. In this paper, we investigate these temperature properties for all loop segments visible in the 171-A image of AR 11294, which was observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on 2011 September 15. Our analysis revealed 19 loop segments, but only 2 of these were clearly isothermal. Six additional segments were effectively isothermal, that is, the plasma emission to which AIA is sensitive could not be distinguished from isothermal emission, within measurement uncertainties. One loop had both isothermal transition region and multithermal coronal solutions. Another five loop segments require multithermal plasma to reproduce the AIA observations. The five remaining loop segments could not be separated reliably from the background in the crucial non-171-A AIA images required for temperature analysis. We hope that the direction of coronal heating models and the efforts modelers spend on various heating scenarios will be influenced by these results.