A segment of bald patch in AR 12673 disintegrated rapidly during solar cycle 24’s most intense flare. The horizontal magnetic field perpendicular to the polarity inversion line changed sign, while the parallel component permanently increased.
Sunquakes are helioseismic waves excited by solar flares, usually observed in the photosphere. However, some of these events are found to have their counterparts in the chromosphere, as observed in the SDO/AIA UV channels.
The Sun’s toroidal field is derived using 45 years of Wilcox Solar Observatory data, 16 years of Michelson Doppler Imager data, and 11 years of Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager data. The duration of each cycle in both hemispheres is also estimated.
In order to make the properties of magnetic features observed by SDO/HMI more accessible, the Solar Photospheric Ephemeral and Active Region (SPEAR) catalogue has been created as an easy-to-read tabulated text file. Tilt angles from the SPEAR catalogue are shown as a histogram (top) and as a function of latitude (bottom) with colors indicating all regions (blue), regions with anti-Joy (red), and anti-Hale (purple) tilts. Over 40% of regions disobey the laws of Joy and Hale.
A time variable center-to-limb effect in photospheric velocity measurements through local correlation tracking is identified, and a robust methodology to correct for it is developed.
A statistical study of hundreds of solar flares, with or without CMEs associated with them, indicates the larger the total magnetic flux of the flare-host active region, the less likely the flare is associated with a CME.
Magnetic-field dependence of active regions’ tilt angles are analyzed using the MDI and HMI observations for two solar cycles. The variation of the tilt angles with the maximum magnetic-field strength of the ARs indicates a nonlinear tilt quenching in the Babcock–Leighton process.
Similar to sunspots, the stable regions of pores on the Sun are also found to be defined by a critical value of the vertical component of the magnetic field. The critical value is comparable to that found in stable sunspots.
An emulation of the VFISV Stokes Inversion that trains a deep
network (U-Net) to map directly from IQUV polarized light to Milne-Eddington magnetic field parameters. The accuracy of this method suggests that it could serve as a warm-start for VFISV or as a pre-disambiguation stand-in.
A surface flux-transport dynamo model assimilation shows that the long-lasting active-region complexes, which appeared in the Sun’s southern hemisphere during Cycle 24, played a crucial role in the pole’s polarity reversal and the field strength at the cycle minimum.