Annihilation of Magnetic Islands at the Top of Solar Flare Loops

The dynamics of magnetic reconnection in the solar current sheet (CS) is studied by high-resolution 2.5-dimensional MHD simulation. With the commencing of magnetic reconnection, a number of magnetic islands are formed intermittently and move quickly upward and downward along the CS. Upon collision with the semi-closed flux of the flare loops, the downflow islands cause a second reconnection with a rate comparable with that in the main CS. Though the time-integrated magnetic energy release is still dominated by the reconnection in the main CS, the second reconnection can release substantial magnetic energy, annihilating the main islands and generating secondary islands with various scales at the flare loop top. The distribution function of the flux of the secondary islands is found to follow a power law varying from f ψ ∼ ψ − 1 (small scale) to ψ −2 (large scale), which seems to be independent to background plasma β and thermal conduction (TC). However, the spatial scale and the strength of the termination shocks driven by the main reconnection outflows or islands decrease if β increases or if TC is included. We suggest that the annihilation of magnetic islands at the flare loop top, which is not included in the standard flare model, plays a nonnegligible role in releasing magnetic energy to heat flare plasma and accelerate particles.

Filament Eruption Driving EUV Loop Contraction and Then Expansion above a Stable Filament

We analyze the observations of EUV loop evolution associated with the filament eruption located at the border of an active region (AR). The event SOL2013-03-16T14:00 was observed with a large difference in view point by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory. The filament height is fitted with the sum of a linear and exponential function. These two phases point to different physical mechanisms such as tether-cutting reconnection and a magnetic instability. While no X-ray emission is reported, this event presents classical eruption features like separation of double ribbons and the growth of flare loops. We report the migration of the southern foot of the erupting filament flux rope due to the interchange reconnection with encountered magnetic loops of a neighboring AR. Parallel to the erupting filament, a stable filament remains in the core of the AR. The specificity of this eruption is that coronal loops, located above the nearly joining ends of the two filaments, first contract in phase, then expand and reach a new stable configuration close to the one present at the eruption onset. Both contraction and expansion phases last around 20 minutes. The main difference with previous cases is that the PIL bent about 180° around the end of the erupting filament because the magnetic configuration is at least tripolar. These observations are challenging for models that interpreted previous cases of loop contraction within a bipolar configuration. New simulations are required to broaden the complexity of the configurations studied.

When hot meets cold: post-flare coronal rain

All solar flares demonstrate a prolonged, hourlong post-flare (or gradual) phase, characterized by arcade-like, post-flare loops (PFLs) visible in many extreme ultraviolet (EUV) passbands. These coronal loops are filled with hot – ~30MK – and dense plasma, evaporated from the chromosphere during the impulsive phase of the flare, and they very gradually recover to normal coronal density and temperature conditions. During this gradual cooling down to ~1MK regimes, much cooler – ~0.01MK – and denser coronal rain is frequently observed inside PFLs. Understanding PFL dynamics in this long-duration, gradual phase is crucial to the entire corona-chromosphere mass and energy cycle. Here we report the first simulation in which a solar flare evolves from pre-flare, over impulsive phase all the way into its gradual phase, which successfully reproduces post-flare coronal rain. This rain results from catastrophic cooling caused by thermal instability, and we analyse the entire mass and energy budget evolution driving this sudden condensation phenomenon. We find that the runaway cooling and rain formation also induces the appearance of dark post-flare loop systems, as observed in EUV channels. We confirm and augment earlier observational findings, suggesting that thermal conduction and radiative losses alternately dominate the cooling of PFLs. Since reconnection-driven flares occur in many astrophysical settings (stellar flares, accretion disks, galactic winds and jets), our study suggests a new and natural pathway to introduce multi-thermal structuring.

Turbulence driven by chromospheric evaporations in solar flares

<p>Chromospheric evaporations are frequently observed at the footpoints of flare loops in flare events. The evaporations flows driven by thermal conduction or fast electron deposition often have high speed of hundreds km/s. Since the speed of the observed evaporation flows is comparable to the local Alfven speed, it is reasonable to consider the triggering of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. Here we revisit a scenario which stresses the importance of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) proposed by Fang et al. (2016). This scenario suggests that evaporations flows from two footpoints of a flare loop can meet each other at the looptop and produce turbulence there via KHI. The produced KHI turbulence can play important roles in particle accelerations and generation of strong looptop hard X-ray sources. We investigate whether evaporation flows can produce turbulence inside the flare loop with the help of numerical simulation. KHI turbulence is successfully produced in our simulation. The synthesized soft X-ray curve demonstrating a clear quasi-periodic pulsation (QPP) with period of 26 s. The QPP is caused by a locally trapped, fast standing wave that resonates in between KHI vortices.</p><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div>

Direct Observation of A Large-scale CME Flux Rope Event Arising from an Unwinding Coronal Jet

<p>Increasing observations show that coronal jets may result in bubble-shaped coronal mass ejections (CMEs), but the genesis of jet-driven CMEs and their nature are not fully understood. Here, we report a direct stereoscopic observation on the magnetic coupling from a coronal blowout jet to a stellar-sized CME.  Observations in the EUV passbands of SDO/AIA show that this whole event starts with a small-scale active-region filament whose eruption occurs at a coronal geyser site due to flux emergence and cancellation. By interacting with an overlying null-point configuration, this erupting filament first breaks one of its legs and triggers an unwinding blowout jet. The release of magnetic twist in its jet spire is estimated at around 1.5−2.0 turns. This prominent twist transport in jet spire rapidly creates a newborn large-scale flux rope from the jet base to a remote site. As a result, the newborn large-scale flux rope erupts into the outer coronae causing an Earth-directed bubble-shaped CME. In particular, two sets of distinct flare post-flare loops form in its source region in sequence, indicating this eruptive event couples with twice flare reconnection. This observation highlights a real pathway for jet-CME magnetic coupling and provides a new hint for the buildup of large-scale CME flux ropes.<span> </span></p>

Моделирование коронального источника жесткого рентгеновского излучения в турбулентной плазме солнечных вспышек

The kinetics of electron beams accelerated in the collisional plasma of solar (stellar) flares is considered, taking into account the stationary ion-acoustic mode localized at the magnetic looptop and magnetic fluctuations. The astrophysical aspect of the propagation process is related to the interpretation of hard X-rays in the plasma of flare loops. It is shown that when the plasma density in the coronal part of the solar flare loops does not exceed 1010 cm-3, taking into account the additional scattering on the ion-acoustic mode with the ratio of the turbulence energy density to the thermal energy of the plasma ~5 * 10-5-10-3 and magnetic fluctuations with a level of 5·10-2 does not lead to the appearance of a bright hard X-ray source in the coronal part of the loop in the model with the isotropic pitch-angle distribution of accelerated electrons. In the anisotropic case with a hard electron energy spectrum, the coronal hard X-ray source, in the presence of ion-acoustic turbulence, can exist for a short time after the beginning of turbulence generation. And only in the case of a soft energy spectrum of accelerated electrons (power spectrum index >5) and a relatively high plasma density at the magnetic looptop >1010 cm-3, a bright coronal hard X-ray source is generated at energies of 25-50 keV, regardless of the pitch-angular distribution of accelerated electrons at the moment of injection. A significant effect of turbulence on the distribution of the linear degree of hard X-ray polarization along the loop is shown, leading to a decrease in the extreme values in the coronal part by 5-35%. The integral values of the hard X-ray polarization do not exceed 10%.

Interplanetary shocks as a source of sustained gamma-ray emission from the Sun

<p>It has recently been shown that the sustained gamma-ray emission (SGRE) from the Sun that lasts for hours beyond the impulsive phase of the associated flare is closely related to radio emission from interplanetary shocks (Gopalswamy et al. 2019, JPhCS, 1332, 012004, 2019). This relationship supports the idea that >300 MeV protons accelerated by CME-driven shocks propagate toward the Sun, collide with chromospheric protons and produce neutral pions that promptly decay into >80 MeV gamma-rays. There have been two challenges to this idea. (i) Since the location of the shock can be halfway between the Sun and Earth at the SGRE end time, it has been suggested that magnetic mirroring will not allow the high energy protons to precipitate. (ii) Lack of correlation between the number protons involved in the production of >100 MeV gamma-rays (Ng) and the number of protons (Nsep) in the associated solar energetic particle (SEP) event has been reported. In this paper, we show that the mirror ratio problem is no different from that in flare loops where electrons and protons precipitate to produce impulsive phase emissions. We also suggest that the lack of Ng – Nsep correlation is due to two reasons: (1) Nsep is underestimated in the case of eruptions happening at large ecliptic latitudes because the high-energy protons accelerated near the nose do not reach the observer. (2) In the case of limb events, the Ng is underestimated because gamma-rays from some part of the extended gamma-ray source do not reach the observer.</p>