  To explain the high temperature of the corona, much attention has been paid
to the distribution of energy in dissipation events. Indeed, if the event
energy distribution is steep enough, the smallest, unobservable events could be
the largest contributors to the total energy dissipation in the corona.
Previous observations have shown a wide distribution of energies but remain
inconclusive about the precise slope. Furthermore, these results rely on a very
crude estimate of the energy. On the other hand, more detailed spectroscopic
studies of structures such as coronal bright points do not provide enough
statistical information to derive their total contribution to heating. We aim
at getting a better estimate of the distributions of the energy dissipated in
coronal heating events using high-resolution, multi-channel Extreme
Ultra-Violet (EUV) data. To estimate the energies corresponding to heating
events and deduce their distribution, we detect brightenings in five EUV
channels of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on-board the Solar Dynamics
Observatory (SDO). We combine the results of these detections and we use maps
of temperature and emission measure derived from the same observations to
compute the energies. We obtain distributions of areas, durations, intensities,
and energies (thermal, radiative, and conductive) of events. These
distributions are power-laws, and we find also power-law correlations between
event parameters. The energy distributions indicate that the energy from a
population of events like the ones we detect represents a small contribution to
the total coronal heating, even when extrapolating to smaller scales. The main
explanations for this are how heating events can be extracted from
observational data, and the incomplete knowledge of the thermal structure and
processes in the coronal plasma attainable from available observations.

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics