Solar Surface Emerging Flux Regions: A Comparative Study of Radiative MHD Modeling and Hinode SOT Observations

By Mark C. M. Cheung, M. Schüssler, T. Tarbell, A. Title. 2008

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from numerical modeling of emerging flux regions on the solar surface. The modeling was carried out by means of three-dimensional (3D) radiative MHD simulations of the rise of buoyant magnetic flux tubes through the convection zone and into the photosphere. Due to the strong stratification of the convection zone, the rise results in a lateral expansion of the tube into a magnetic sheet, which acts as a reservoir for small-scale flux emergence events at the scale of granulation. The interaction of the convective downflows and the rising magnetic flux tube undulates it to form serpentine field lines that emerge into the photosphere. Observational characteristics, including the pattern of the emerging flux regions, the cancellation of surface flux and associated high-speed downflows, the convective collapse of photospheric flux tubes, the appearance of anomalous darkenings, the formation of bright points, and the possible existence of transient kilogauss horizontal fields are discussed in the context of new observations from the Hinode Solar Optical Telescope. Implications for the local helioseismology of emerging flux regions are also discussed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f549ae63a92be7aba0e448813e28350dd425613

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Local Helioseismology: Three-Dimensional Imaging of the Solar Interior (2010, background): “These are beginning to look much like real observations (Cheung et al. 2008).”
Magnetic Flux Transport at the Solar Surface (2014, background): “The emergence processes have been modeled in detail for bothlarge-scale active regions (e.g., Cheung et al. 2008, 2010; Stein et al. 2011) and for the smallscale dynamo processes (Vögler and Schüssler 2007; Schüssler and Vögler 2008).”
Sunrise: INSTRUMENT, MISSION, DATA, AND FIRST RESULTS (2010, background): “There are also locations at which fresh flux emerges in a complex patch of mixed polarities (e.g. Zhang et al. 1998), similar to the simulations of Cheung et al. (2008), but on a small scale.”
Driving major solar flares and eruptions: A review (2008, background): “Recent numerical simulations of emerging flux (e.g., Cheung et al. 2008) support such an interpretation.”
SIMULATION OF THE FORMATION OF A SOLAR ACTIVE REGION (2010, background): “We emphasize that these streaming magnetic polarities are more akin to the moving dipolar features (MDFs, Bernasconi et al. 2002) found in emerging flux regions (Strous et al. 1996; Schlichenmaier et al. 2010) than the so-called Type I moving magnetic features (MMFs), which likely also have serpenti”