No Arabic abstract
The physical conditions leading the sunspot penumbra decay are poorly understood so far. We investigate the photospheric magnetic and velocity properties of a sunspot penumbra during the decay phase to advance the current knowledge of the conditions leading to this process. A penumbral decay was observed with the CRISP instrument at the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope on 2016 September 4 and 5 in active region NOAA 12585. During these days, full-Stokes spectropolarimetric scans along the Fe I 630 nm line pair were acquired over more than one hour. We inverted these observations with the VFISV code in order to obtain the evolution of the magnetic and velocity properties. We complement the study with data from instruments onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Hinode space missions. The studied penumbra disappears progressively in both time and space. The magnetic flux evolution seems to be linked to the presence of Moving Magnetic Features (MMFs). Decreasing Stokes V signals are observed. Evershed flows and horizontal fields were detected even after the disappearance of the penumbral sector. The analyzed penumbral decay seems to result from the interaction between opposite polarity fields in type III MMFs and penumbra, while the presence of overlying canopies rules the evolution in the different penumbral sectors.
Penumbral transient brightening events have been attributed to magnetic reconnection episodes occurring in the low corona. We investigated the trigger mechanism of these events in active region NOAA 12546 by using multi-wavelength observations obtained with the Interferometric Bidimensional Spectrometer (IBIS), by the textit{Solar Dynamics Observatory} (SDO), the textit{Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph} (IRIS), and the textit{Hinode} satellites. We focused on the evolution of an area of the penumbra adjacent to two small-scale emerging flux regions (EFRs), which manifested three brightening events detected from the chromosphere to the corona. Two of these events correspond to B-class flares. The same region showed short-lived moving magnetic features (MMFs) that streamed out from the penumbra. In the photosphere, the EFRs led to small-scale penumbral changes associated with a counter-Evershed flow and to a reconfiguration of the magnetic fields in the moat. The brightening events had one of the footpoints embedded in the penumbra and seemed to result from the distinctive interplay between the pre-existing penumbral fields, MMFs, and the EFRs. The textit{IRIS} spectra measured therein reveal enhanced temperature and asymmetries in spectral lines, suggestive of event triggering at different height in the atmosphere. Specifically, the blue asymmetry noted in ion{C}{2} and ion{Mg}{2} h&k lines suggests the occurrence of chromospheric evaporation at the footpoint located in the penumbra as a consequence of magnetic reconnection process at higher atmospheric heigths.
We report a detailed observational study of two quasi-periodic fast-propagating (QFP) magnetosonic wave events occurred on 2011 March 09 and 10, respectively. Interestingly, both the two events have two wave trains (WTs): one main and strong (WT-1) whereas the second appears small and weak (WT-2). Peculiar and common characteristics of the two events are observed, namely: 1) the two QFP waves are accompanied with brightenings during the whole stage of the eruptions; 2) both the two main wave trains are nearly propagating along the same direction; 3) EUV waves are found to be associated with the two events. Investigating various aspects of the target events, we argue that: 1) the second event is accompanied with a flux rope eruption during the whole stage; 2) the second event eruption produces a new filament-like (FL) dark feature; 3) the ripples of the two WT-2 QFP waves seem to result from different triggering mechanisms. Based on the obtained observational results, we propose that the funnel-like coronal loop system is indeed playing an important role in the two WT-1 QFP waves. The development of the second WT-2 QFP wave can be explained as due to the dispersion of the main EUV front. The co-existence of the two events offer thereby a significant opportunity to reveal what driving mechanisms and structures are tightly related to the waves.
Four different methods are applied here to study the precursors of flare activity in the Active Region NOAA 10486. Two approaches track the temporal behaviour of suitably chosen features (one, the weighted horizontal gradient WGM, is generalised form the horizontal gradient of the magnetic field, GM; another is the sum of the horizontal gradient of the magnetic field, GS, for all sunspot pairs). WGM is a photospheric indicator that is a proxy measure of magnetic non-potentiality of a specific area of the active region, i.e. it captures the temporal variation of the weighted horizontal gradient of magnetic flux summed up for the region where opposite magnetic polarities are highly mixed. The third one, referred to as the separateness parameter, S(lf), considers the overall morphology. Further, GS and S(lf) are photospheric newly defined quick-look indicators of the polarity mix of the entire active region. The fourth method is tracking the temporal variation of small x-ray flares, their times of succession and their energies observed by the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager instrument. All approaches yield specific pre-cursory signatures for the imminence of flares.
Solar Active Region NOAA 11158 has hosted a number of strong flares, including one X2.2 event. The complexity of current density and current helicity are studied through cancellation analysis of their sign-singular measure, which features power-law scaling. Spectral analysis is also performed, revealing the presence of two separate scaling ranges with different spectral index. The time evolution of parameters is discussed. Sudden changes of the cancellation exponents at the time of large flares, and the presence of correlation with EUV and X-ray flux, suggest that eruption of large flares can be linked to the small scale properties of the current structures.
The NOAA active region AR 11029 was a small but highly active sunspot region which produced 73 GOES soft X-ray flares. The flares appear to show a departure from the well known power-law frequency-size distribution. Specifically, too few GOES C-class and no M-class flares were observed by comparison with a power-law distribution (Wheatland in Astrophys. J. 710, 1324, 2010). This was conjectured to be due to the region having insufficient magnetic energy to power large events. We construct nonlinear force-free extrapolations of the coronal magnetic field of active region AR 11029 using data taken on 24 October by the SOLIS Vector-SpectroMagnetograph (SOLIS/VSM), and data taken on 27 October by the Hinode Solar Optical Telescope SpectroPolarimeter (Hinode/SP). Force-free modeling with photospheric magnetogram data encounters problems because the magnetogram data are inconsistent with a force-free model, and we employ a recently developed `self-consistency procedure which addresses this and accommodates uncertainties in the boundary data (Wheatland and Regnier in Astrophys. J. 700, L88, 2009). We calculate the total energy and free energy of the self-consistent solution and find that the free energy was 4x10^29 erg on 24 October, and 7x10^31 erg on 27 October. An order of magnitude scaling between RHESSI non-thermal energy and GOES peak X-ray flux is established from a sample of flares from the literature and is used to estimate flare energies from observed GOES peak X-ray flux. Based on the scaling, we conclude that the estimated free energy of AR 11029 on 27 October when the flaring rate peaked is sufficient to power M-class or X-class flares, and hence the modeling does not appear to support the hypothesis that the absence of large flares is due to the region having limited energy.