NEW YORK: Scientists at NJIT’s Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) have captured the first high-resolution images of the flaring magnetic structures known as solar flux ropes at their point of origin in the Sun’s chromosphere. Their research, published in Nature Communications, provides new insights into the massive eruptions on the Sun’s surface responsible for space weather.
Flux ropes are bundles of magnetic fields that together rotate and twist around a common axis, driven by motions in the photosphere, a high-density layer of the Sun’s atmosphere below the solar corona and chromosphere. The NJIT images were taken from observations of the newly commissioned 1.6m New Solar Telescope (NST) at BBSO.
“These twisting magnetic loops have been much studied in the Sun’s corona, or outer layer, but these are the first high-resolution images of their origination in the chromosphere below it. For the first time, we can see their twisting motion in great detail and watch how it evolves,” said Haimin Wang, distinguished professor of physics at NJIT and the study’s lead author.
Wang and his co-authors strung together a series of images which trace the formation of an S-shaped bundle of magnetic fields from which a set of loops peel off and grow upward into a multi-strand flux rope within a few minutes. Two flare ribbons appear at the two sides of the rising flux rope.
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