MSC candidate ZHOU Chengrui, from Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his cooperators reported sympathetic filament eruptions within a fan-spine structure. Their research was published on The Astrophysical Journal a few days ago.

A fan-spine magnetic structure often manifests as a central parasitic magnetic field encompassed by the opposite polarity, and the corresponding overlying coronal magnetic field shows a fan-spine magnetic configuration consisting of a dome-shaped fan structure, a null point, and inner and outer spines.

Some successive events occurred within a short time interval in the same complicated active region or at different active regions, they may physically connect to each other, which were known as sympathetic eruptions. Up to now, the physical linkage of the sympathetic eruption still remains poorly understood.

Magnetic implosion means that transient events could throw the free magnetic energy into the low plasma β corona, results in the decrease of the magnetic pressure around the energy releasing regions, showing as the expanding and contracting of confined loops.

Using the multi-wavelength observations and nonlinear force- free field (NLFFF) calculation of the successive filament eruptions, they find a clear fan-spine structure and hold the view that the first filament (F1) eruption was triggered by the reconnection between two mini-filaments. In this process, the occurrence of magnetic implosion changed the magnetic topology (the fan structure) upon another larger filament (F2), which resulted in the eruption of F2 by torus instability.

This study reveals the physical linkage of the sympathetic filament eruptions. Generally, the observational and numerical simulation work consider the fan-spine magnetic system as the basic coronal magnetic structure of large-scale energetic solar eruptions, like filament eruptions and coronal mass ejection (CMEs). Now many recent high spatiotemporal resolution observations showed that solar jets can be also driven by mini-filament eruptions in fan-spine systems, the eruption mechanism of the present event can also be used to explain the eruption of solar jets. (within 10 days)

Contact:

SHEN Yuandeng, Yunnan Observatories, CAS

ydshen@ynao.ac.cn