Of three consecutive flares that occurred in a same active region within 4 hours, why were two non-eruptive and one eruptive? Non-linear force-free modeling suggest that breakout reconnection during the first two flares weakened the overlying field, allowing the flux rope to erupt in the third.
In an MHD simulation of flux emergence, a δ-sunspot is formed spontaneously by a collision of areas with opposite polarities. Driven by convective flows and counter-streaming flows, sheared polarity inversion lines form and flux ropes are created above.
Subsurface meridional flows from ring-diagram analysis showed a clear hemispheric asymmetry in last 18 years. Interestingly, this flow asymmetry leads the magnetic flux and sunspot number asymmetry by 3.1 – 3.6 years.
Photospheric magnetic properties for a set of coronal holes are investigated using HMI magnetograms, and it is found that the overall unbalanced magnetic flux of the coronal holes arises from long-lived magnetic elements with a lifetime longer than 40 hours.
A novel approach is developed to reconstruct the surface magnetic helicity density for the Sun or sun-like stars. The method is applied on the SDO/HMI-observed vector field synoptic data to study the temporal evolution of the Sun’s magnetic helicity density during Solar Cycle 24.
The Sun’s oblateness shows a variation with solar cycles, in phase with the solar activity level in Cycle 23 but in anti-phase with the activity level in Cycle 24. Such a trend of in-phase during odd cycles and anti-phase during even cycles is confirmed after examining past observations.
A deep learning code is trained using the Sun’s front-side observations, HMI’s magnetograms and AIA’s 304Å EUV images, to establish a relation between magnetic field and EUV flux. Then the code is applied on the STEREO/EUVI 304Å data to obtain the Sun’s far-side magnetic field.
An algorithm, which is to calculate the electric field in order to retrieve the time variations of solar surface magnetic field observed by HMI, was recently developed.
Helicity injection by the continued shear and converging flows contributes to a sigmoid’s sustenance, its core field twist, ans its eventual eruption.
Through analyzing simultaneous HMI’s visible-light observations and AIA’s ultraviolet observations, the authors show that a significant amount of acoustic waves with frequencies lower than the theoretical cutoff frequency can channel up along less inclined magnetic field from the photosphere to the chromosphere.