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Coronal Mass Ejections from the Same Active Region Cluster: Two Different Perspectives

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Abstract

The cluster formed by active regions (ARs) NOAA 11121 and 11123, approximately located on the solar central meridian on 11 November 2010, is of great scientific interest. This complex was the site of violent flux emergence and the source of a series of Earth-directed events on the same day. The onset of the events was nearly simultaneously observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) telescope onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imagers (EUVI) on the Sun-Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) suite of telescopes onboard the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) twin spacecraft. The progression of these events in the low corona was tracked by the Large Angle Spectroscopic Coronagraphs (LASCO) onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the SECCHI/COR coronagraphs on STEREO. SDO and SOHO imagers provided data from the Earth’s perspective, whilst the STEREO twin instruments procured images from the orthogonal directions. This spatial configuration of spacecraft allowed optimum simultaneous observations of the AR cluster and the coronal mass ejections that originated in it. Quadrature coronal observations provided by STEREO revealed many more ejective events than were detected from Earth. Furthermore, joint observations by SDO/AIA and STEREO/SECCHI EUVI of the source region indicate that all events classified by GOES as X-ray flares had an ejective coronal counterpart in quadrature observations. These results directly affect current space weather forecasting because alarms might be missed when there is a lack of solar observations in a view direction perpendicular to the Sun-Earth line.

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Acknowledgements

H. Cremades and C.H. Mandrini acknowledge financial support from the Argentinean grants PICT 2012-973 (ANPCyT) and PIP 2012-100413 (CONICET). H. Cremades and C.H. Mandrini are members of the Carrera del Investigador Científico (CONICET). A.M. Crescitelli acknowledges funding from the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA). The authors are thankful to Germán Cristiani for his help with GOES data and to the referee for valuable comments and suggestions. The SOHO/LASCO data are produced by an international consortium of the NRL (USA), MPI für Sonnensystemforschung (Germany), Laboratoire d’Astronomie (France), and the University of Birmingham (UK). SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. The STEREO/SECCHI project is an international consortium of the NRL, LMSAL and NASA/GSFC (USA), RAL and Univ. Bham (UK), MPS (Germany), CSL (Belgium), IOTA and IAS (France). SDO/AIA and SDO/HMI data are courtesy of the NASA/SDO and the AIA and HMI Science Teams. This article uses data from the SOHO/LASCO CME catalog generated and maintained at the CDAW Data Center by NASA and the CUA in cooperation with NRL, from the CACTus CME catalog generated and maintained by the SIDC at the ROB, the SEEDS project supported by the NASA/LWS and AISRP programs, and the LASCO ARTEMIS Catalog built by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille.

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  1. Facultad Regional Mendoza, CONICET, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Mendoza, Argentina

    H. Cremades

  2. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE), CONICET-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    C. H. Mandrini

  3. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEN), UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    C. H. Mandrini

  4. Observatoire de Paris, Meudon, 92190, France

    B. Schmieder

  5. Instituto Balseiro, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina

    A. M. Crescitelli

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Cremades, H., Mandrini, C.H., Schmieder, B. et al. Coronal Mass Ejections from the Same Active Region Cluster: Two Different Perspectives. Sol Phys 290, 1671–1686 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-015-0717-9

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