No Arabic abstract
As an observational case study, we consider the origin of a prominent poleward surge of leading polarity, visible in the magnetic butterfly diagram during Solar Cycle 24. A new technique is developed for assimilating individual regions of strong magnetic flux into a surface flux transport model. By isolating the contribution of each of these regions, the model shows the surge to originate primarily in a single high-latitude activity group consisting of a bipolar active region present in Carrington Rotations 2104-05 (November 2010-January 2011) and a multipolar active region in Rotations 2107-08 (February-April 2011). This group had a strong axial dipole moment opposed to Joys law. On the other hand, the modelling suggests that the transient influence of this group on the butterfly diagram will not be matched by a large long-term contribution to the polar field, because of its location at high latitude. This is in accordance with previous flux transport models.
We investigate the characteristics and the sources of the slow (< 450 km/s) solar wind during the four years (2006-2009) of low solar activity between Solar Cycles 23 and 24. We use a comprehensive set of in-situ observations in the near-Earth solar wind (Wind and ACE) and remove the periods when large-scale interplanetary coronal mass ejections were present. The investigated period features significant variations in the global coronal structure, including the frequent presence of low-latitude active regions in 2006-2007, long-lived low- and mid-latitude coronal holes in 2006 - mid-2008 and mostly the quiet Sun in 2009. We examine both Carrington Rotation averages of selected solar plasma, charge state and compositional parameters and distributions of these parameters related to Quiet Sun, Active Region Sun and the Coronal Hole Sun. While some of the investigated parameters (e.g., speed, the C^{+6}/C^{+4} and He/H ratio) show clear variations over our study period and with solar wind source type, some (Fe/O) exhibit very little changes. Our results highlight the difficulty in distinguishing between the slow solar wind sources based on the inspection of the solar wind conditions.
The paper presents results of a search for helioseismic events (sunquakes) produced by M-X class solar flares during Solar Cycle 24. The search is performed by analyzing photospheric Dopplergrams from Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI). Among the total number of 500 M-X class flares, 94 helioseismic events were detected. Our analysis has shown that many strong sunquakes were produced by solar flares of low M class (M1-M5), while in some powerful X-class flares helioseismic waves were not observed or were weak. Our study also revealed that only several active regions were characterized by the most efficient generation of helioseismic waves during flares. We found that the sunquake power correlates with the maximum value of the soft X-ray flux time derivative better than with the X-ray class, indicating that the sunquake mechanism is associated with high-energy particles. We also show that the seismically active flares are more impulsive than the flares without helioseismic perturbations. We present a new catalog of helioseismic solar flares, which opens opportunities for performing statistical studies to better understand the physics of sunquakes as well as the flare energy release and transport.
We have studied long-term variations of galactic cosmic ray (GCR) intensity in relation to the sunspot number (SSN) during the most recent solar cycles. This study analyses the time-lag between the GCR intensity and SSN, and hysteresis plots of the GCR count rate against SSN for solar activity cycles 20-23 to validate a methodology against previous results in the literature, before applying the method to provide a timely update on the behaviour of cycle 24. Cross-plots of SSN vs GCR show a clear difference between the odd-numbered and even-numbered cycles. Linear and elliptical models have been fit to the data with the linear fit and elliptical model proving the more suitable model for even-numbered and odd-numbered solar activity cycles respectively, in agreement with previous literature. Through the application of these methods for the 24th solar activity cycle, it has been shown that cycle 24 experienced a lag of 2-4 months and follows the trend of the preceding activity cycles albeit with a slightly longer lag than previous even-numbered cycles. It has been shown through the hysteresis analysis that the linear fit is a better representative model for cycle 24, as the ellipse model doesnt show a significant improvement, which is also in agreement with previous even-numbered cycles.
The Large Yield Radiometer (LYRA) is a radiometer that has monitored the solar irradiance at high cadence and in four pass bands since January 2010. Both the instrument and its space- craft, PROBA2 (Project for On-Board Autonomy), have several innovative features for space instrumentation, which makes the data reduction necessary to retrieve the long term variations of solar irradiance more complex than for a fully optimized solar physics mission. In this paper, we describe how we compute the long term time series of the two extreme ultraviolet irradiance channels of LYRA, and compare the results with SDO/EVE. We find that the solar EUV irradi- ance has increased by a factor 2 since the last solar minimum (between solar cycles 23 and 24), which agrees reasonably well with the EVE observations.
Similar to the Sun, other stars shed mass and magnetic flux via ubiquitous quasi-steady wind and episodic stellar coronal mass ejections (CMEs). We investigate the mass loss rate via solar wind and CMEs as a function of solar magnetic variability represented in terms of sunspot number and solar X-ray background luminosity. We estimate the contribution of CMEs to the total solar wind mass flux in the ecliptic and beyond, and its variation over different phases of the solar activity cycles. The study exploits the number of sunspots observed, coronagraphic observations of CMEs near the Sun by SOHO/LASCO, in situ observations of the solar wind at 1 AU by WIND, and GOES X-ray flux during solar cycle 23 and 24. We note that the X-ray background luminosity, occurrence rate of CMEs and ICMEs, solar wind mass flux, and associated mass loss rates from the Sun do not decrease as strongly as the sunspot number from the maximum of solar cycle 23 to the next maximum. Our study confirms a true physical increase in CME activity relative to the sunspot number in cycle 24. We show that the CME occurrence rate and associated mass loss rate can be better predicted by X-ray background luminosity than the sunspot number. The solar wind mass loss rate which is an order of magnitude more than the CME mass loss rate shows no obvious dependency on cyclic variation in sunspot number and solar X-ray background luminosity. These results have implications to the study of solar-type stars.