Solar eruptions and the related processes involve magnetic fields and plasma flows of various scales in both time and space. These processes include the convective motions of the mass and magnetic field in the photosphere, evolutions of magnetic fields in both the chromosphere and the corona prior to and during the disruption of magnetic fields in response to the photospheric motions. These evolutions constitute a whole process of transporting the magnetic energy and the helicity from the photosphere to the corona, and then to interplanetary space. The present work, on the basis of a solar eruption model, discusses these processes, and the related questions, unanswerable at present, but could be the scientific objectives of the space solar missions in the future.
LIN Jun1,21 National Astronomical Observatories/Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming 650011, China
Utilized here is the Carte Synoptique solar filament archive, namely the catalogue of solar filaments from March 1919 to December 1989, corresponding to solar rotation numbers 876 to 1823 to study latitudinal migration of solar activity at high latitudes. Except the well-known poleward migration of solar activity from middle latitudes to the poles, an equatorward migration is found from the solar poles toward middle latitudes (about 40°) within a normal cycle, which is neglected before, and the time in-terval for the former migration (4.4 years) is about 2.2 years shorter than that for the latter (6.6 years), indicating that the change from one migration to the other takes place around the maximum time of a normal cycle. In the future, a dynamo model should represent the migration from the poles toward middle latitudes of the Sun, besides the migration in "butterfly diagrams" and the "rush to the poles". The traditional extended activity cycle is actually a part of the period of the successive migration from the poles toward the solar equator.
Following Pevtsov and Latushko, we study the current helicity pattern of the large-scale magnetic field on the photosphere. We use the same technique as theirs to derive the vector magnetic field (Br,Bθ,Bφ) from full-disk longitudinal magnetograms based on the assumption that large-scale magnetic fields evolve rather slowly and the variations of the longitudinal magnetic fields within certain time duration are caused by the changing position angles only. Different from their study, we have calculated the current helicity maps directly from the derived vector magnetograms, rather than from obtaining the latitudinal variation of hc by ignoring the role of Bθ component and averaging Br and Bφ over all solar longitudes. This approach significantly strengthens the evidence of the hemispheric rule presented in the reconstructed vector magnetic field. Our study shows that the established hemispheric sign rule, that is, positive helicity sign in the southern hemisphere and negative helicity sign in the northern hemisphere, is applicable everywhere in the global magnetic field, namely, also evident in weak fields outside active regions, and that the obtained sign pattern is independent of the longitudinal magnetograms and the parameters that we have used.
We use a few solar partial eclipse observations made by XRT/Hinode to estimate the influence of stray-light component in determining coronal temperature structures. Our analysis shows that the stray light will largely affect the estimation of coronal temperature and change the estimated temperature structure in one coronal hole region. The stray lights mildly influence the estimated temperatures in one quiet Sun region and do not change the estimated temperature structure. This implies that the influence of stray lights differs from one region to another, and definitely needs to be considered in some regions. Whereas a carefully estimated point-spread-function is needed to remove the stray light component, our study shows that by a simple approach such as subtracting the average intensity of distant (e.g. >1.4 solar radius) points from the data values, the influence of stray light can be largely removed, at least for the two regions we study here.
