Abstract
Our analysis in Papers I and II (Grechnev et al., Solar Phys. 289, 289, 2014b and Solar Phys. 289, 1279, 2014c) of the 18 November 2003 solar event responsible for the 20 November geomagnetic superstorm has revealed a complex chain of eruptions. In particular, the eruptive filament encountered a topological discontinuity located near the solar disk center at a height of about 100 Mm, bifurcated, and transformed into a large cloud, which did not leave the Sun. Concurrently, an additional CME presumably erupted close to the bifurcation region. The conjectures about the responsibility of this compact CME for the superstorm and its disconnection from the Sun are confirmed in Paper IV (Grechnev et al., Solar Phys. submitted, 2014a), which concludes about its probable spheromak-like structure. The present article confirms the presence of a magnetic null point near the bifurcation region and addresses the origin of the magnetic helicity of the interplanetary magnetic clouds and their connection to the Sun. We find that the orientation of a magnetic dipole constituted by dimmed regions with the opposite magnetic polarities away from the parent active region corresponded to the direction of the axial field in the magnetic cloud, while the pre-eruptive filament mismatched it. To combine all of the listed findings, we propose an intrinsically three-dimensional scheme, in which a spheromak-like eruption originates via the interaction of the initially unconnected magnetic fluxes of the eruptive filament and pre-existing ones in the corona. Through a chain of magnetic reconnections their positive mutual helicity was transformed into the self-helicity of the spheromak-like magnetic cloud.
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Acknowledgements
We thank V. Yurchyshyn, who kindly supplied the vector magnetogram of AR 501 observed at BBSO, and M. Temmer for the Hα data. We thank the co-authors of our Papers I, II, and IV who are not involved in this study. We acknowledge an anonymous referee for valuable remarks and comments. We are grateful to the instrumental teams of the Kanzelhöhe Solar Observatory; TRACE and CORONAS-F missions; MDI and EIT on SOHO (ESA and NASA) for the data used here. This study was supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research under grants 11-02-00757, 11-02-01079, 12-02-00008, 12-02-92692, and 12-02-00037, and the Ministry of Education and Science of Russian Federation, projects 8407 and 14.518.11.7047.
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Uralov, A.M., Grechnev, V.V., Rudenko, G.V. et al. A Challenging Solar Eruptive Event of 18 November 2003 and the Causes of the 20 November Geomagnetic Superstorm. III. Catastrophe of the Eruptive Filament at a Magnetic Null Point and Formation of an Opposite-Handedness CME. Sol Phys 289, 3747–3772 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-014-0536-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-014-0536-4