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Near-Sun Flux-Rope Structure of CMEs

  • Flux-Rope Structure of Coronal Mass Ejections
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Abstract

We have used the Krall flux-rope model (Krall and St. Cyr, Astrophys. J. 2006, 657, 1740) (KFR) to fit 23 magnetic cloud (MC)-CMEs and 30 non-cloud ejecta (EJ)-CMEs in the Living With a Star (LWS) Coordinated Data Analysis Workshop (CDAW) 2011 list. The KFR-fit results shows that the CMEs associated with MCs (EJs) have been deflected closer to (away from) the solar disk center (DC), likely by both the intrinsic magnetic structures inside an active region (AR) and ambient magnetic structures (e.g. nearby ARs, coronal holes, and streamers, etc.). The mean absolute propagation latitudes and longitudes of the EJ-CMEs (18∘, 11∘) were larger than those of the MC-CMEs (11∘, 6∘) by 7∘ and 5∘, respectively. Furthermore, the KFR-fit widths showed that the MC-CMEs are wider than the EJ-CMEs. The mean fitting face-on width and edge-on width of the MC-CMEs (EJ-CMEs) were 87 (85)∘ and 70 (63)∘, respectively. The deflection away from DC and narrower angular widths of the EJ-CMEs have caused the observing spacecraft to pass over only their flanks and miss the central flux-rope structures. The results of this work support the idea that all CMEs have a flux-rope structure.

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Acknowledgements

This work uses data from the NASA/LWS Coordinated Data Analysis Workshops on CME/flux-ropes in 2010 and 2011. We acknowledge the workshop support provided by NASA/LWS, Predictive Sciences, Inc. (San Diego, CA), University of Alcala (Alcala de Henares, Spain), and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (Reference number AYA2010-12439-E), Spain. The authors acknowledge support of NASA grant LWSTRT08-0029.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Solar Physics Lab, IACS/CUA – NASA Goddard Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA

    H. Xie

  2. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 671, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA

    N. Gopalswamy & O. C. St. Cyr

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  1. H. Xie
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  2. N. Gopalswamy
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  3. O. C. St. Cyr
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Correspondence to H. Xie.

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Flux-Rope Structure of Coronal Mass Ejections

Guest Editors: N. Gopalswamy, T. Nieves-Chinchilla, M. Hidalgo, J. Zhang, and P. Riley

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Xie, H., Gopalswamy, N. & St. Cyr, O.C. Near-Sun Flux-Rope Structure of CMEs. Sol Phys 284, 47–58 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-012-0209-0

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