Imaging coronal magnetic-field reconnection in a solar flare

By Yang Su, Astrid Veronig, Gordon D. Holman, Brian R. Dennis, Tongjiang Wang, M. Temmer, W. Gan. Nature Physics, 2013

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extreme ultraviolet and X-ray imaging of a solar flare with unprecedented clarity now provide visual evidence that magnetic reconnection plays a fundamental role in generating solar flares. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is able to observe a ’cold’ plasma moving into the reconnection point and the simultaneous acceleration of a hot-flare-heated plasma away from it. Magnetic-field reconnection is believed to play a fundamental role in magnetized plasma systems throughout the Universe1, including planetary magnetospheres, magnetars and accretion disks around black holes. This letter presents extreme ultraviolet and X-ray observations of a solar flare showing magnetic reconnection with a level of clarity not previously achieved. The multi-wavelength extreme ultraviolet observations from SDO/AIA show inflowing cool loops and newly formed, outflowing hot loops, as predicted. RHESSI X-ray spectra and images simultaneously show the appearance of plasma heated to >10 MK at the expected locations. These two data sets provide solid visual evidence of magnetic reconnection producing a solar flare, validating the basic physical mechanism of popular flare models. However, new features are also observed that need to be included in reconnection and flare studies, such as three-dimensional non-uniform, non-steady and asymmetric evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75c1a3d1d566c03ab2a59a2f599b0058b19ccd79

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. Xin Cheng
  2. M. Ding

Citations in the corpus