Abstract
The different appearances exhibited by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are believed to be in part the result of different orientations of their main axis of symmetry, consistent with a flux-rope configuration. There are observational reports of CMEs seen along their main axis (axial perspective) and perpendicular to it (lateral perspective), but no simultaneous observations of both perspectives from the same CME have been reported to date. The stereoscopic views of the telescopes onboard the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) twin spacecraft, in combination with the views from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), allow us to study the axial and lateral perspectives of a CME simultaneously for the first time. In addition, this study shows that the lateral angular extent (L) increases linearly with time, while the angular extent of the axial perspective (D) presents this behavior only from the low corona to \({\approx}\,5~\mbox{R}_{\odot}\), where it slows down. The ratio \(L/D \approx 1.6\) obtained here as the average over several points in time is consistent with measurements of L and D previously performed on events exhibiting only one of the perspectives from the single vantage point provided by SOHO.
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Acknowledgements
I. Cabello acknowledges a postdoctoral fellowship from CONICET. H. Cremades and L. Balmaceda are members of the Carrera del Investigador Científico (CONICET). The authors acknowledge funding from UTN project PID UTI2218 and thank the anonymous referee for valuable 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 data are courtesy of the NASA/SDO and the AIA 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.
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Cabello, I., Cremades, H., Balmaceda, L. et al. First Simultaneous Views of the Axial and Lateral Perspectives of a Coronal Mass Ejection. Sol Phys 291, 1799–1817 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-016-0941-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-016-0941-y