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Free keywords:
Sun: activity; Sun: atmosphere; Sun: magnetic fields; magnetic
reconnection; Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Abstract:
Context. Magnetic reconnection in the deep solar atmosphere can give rise to enhanced emission in the Balmer hydrogen lines, a phenomenon referred to as Ellerman bombs.
Aims: To effectively trace magnetic reconnection below the canopy of chromospheric fibrils, we analyzed unique spectroscopic observations of Ellerman bombs in the Hα line.
Methods: We analyzed a 10 min data set of a young emerging active region observed with the prototype of the Microlensed Hyperspectral Imager (MiHI) at the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST). The MiHI instrument is an integral field spectrograph that is capable of achieving simultaneous ultra-high resolution in the spatial, temporal, and spectral domains. With the combination of the SST adaptive optics system and image restoration techniques, MiHI can deliver diffraction-limited observations if the atmospheric seeing conditions allow. The data set samples the Hα line over 4.5 Å with 10 mÅ pix-1, with 0.″065 pix-1 over a field of view of 8.″6 × 7.″7, and at a temporal cadence of 1.33 s. This constitutes a hyperspectral data cube that measures 132 × 118 spatial pixels, 456 spectral pixels, and 455 time steps.
Results: There were multiple sites with Ellerman bomb activity associated with strong magnetic flux emergence. The Ellerman bomb activity is very dynamic, showing rapid variability and a small-scale substructure. We found a number of plasmoid-like blobs with full-width-half-maximum sizes between 0.″1 and 0.″4 and moving with apparent velocities between 14 and 77 km s-1. Some of these blobs have Ellerman bomb spectral profiles with a single peak at a Doppler offset between 47 and 57 km s-1.
Conclusions: Our observations support the idea that fast magnetic reconnection in Ellerman bombs is mediated by the formation of plasmoids. These MiHI observations demonstrate that a microlens-based integral field spectrograph is capable of probing fundamental physical processes in the solar atmosphere. <P />Movies associated to Figs. 2-6 and A.1 are available at <A href="https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202345933/olm">https://www.aanda.org</A>
