Abstract
When magnetic flux emerges from beneath the photosphere, it displaces the preexisting field in the corona, and a current sheet generally forms at the boundary between the old and new magnetic domains. Reconnection in the current sheet relaxes this highly stressed configuration to a lower energy state. This scenario is most familiar and most often studied in flares, where the flux transfer is rapid. We present here a study of steady, quiescent flux transfer occurring at a rate three orders of magnitude lower than that in a large flare. In particular, we quantify the reconnection rate and the related energy release that occurred as the new polarity emerged to form NOAA Active Region 11112 (SOL16 October 2010T00:00:00L205C117) within a region of preexisting flux. A bright, low-lying kernel of coronal loops above the emerging polarity, observed with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the X-ray Telescope onboard Hinode, originally showed magnetic connectivity only between regions of newly emerged flux when overlaid on magnetograms from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. Over the course of several days, this bright kernel advanced into the preexisting flux. The advancement of an easily visible boundary into the old flux regions allows measuring the rate of reconnection between old and new magnetic domains. We compare the reconnection rate with the inferred heating of the coronal plasma. To our knowledge, this is the first measurement of steady, quiescent heating related to reconnection. We determined that the newly emerged flux reconnects at a fairly steady rate of 0.38×1016 Mx s−1 over two days, while the radiated power varies between (2 – 8)×1025 erg s−1 over the same time. We found that as much as 40 % of the total emerged flux at any given time may have reconnected. The total amounts of transferred flux (∼ 1×1021 Mx) and radiated energy (∼ 7.2×1030 ergs) are comparable to that of a large M- or small X-class flare, but are stretched out over 45 hours.
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Notes
Here and throughout, all times are stated in UT.
Note that the region labels are different in the present simplified study than in Tarr and Longcope (2012).
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This work is supported by NASA under contract SP02H3901R from Lockheed–Martin to MSU. We would like to acknowledge our use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System.
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The Many Scales of Solar Activity in Solar Cycle 24 as seen by SDO
Guest Editors: Aaron Birch, Mark Cheung, Andrew Jones, and W. Dean Pesnell
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Tarr, L.A., Longcope, D.W., McKenzie, D.E. et al. Quiescent Reconnection Rate Between Emerging Active Regions and Preexisting Field, with Associated Heating: NOAA AR 11112. Sol Phys 289, 3331–3349 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0462-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0462-x