A Dynamic Study of Coronal Brightenings

Lead Investigator:
Brian Handy (Montana State University)

Team Members:
Karel Schrijver
Mandy Hagenaar

Technical Summary:

A huge volume of literature has been generated since Coronal Bright Points were first discovered in the pre-Skylab era. A large of work was initially based on Skylab observations and much recent work has been done with Yohkoh/SXT data. While Yohkoh made much more rapid observations possible, it is clear that the timescales of events in the photospheric magnetic field are in general always faster than observing cadence. Recent observations from MDI (Schrijver et al. 1997) have shown that network concentrations exist as a unit for only fractions of a day, and substantial reorganization of the magnetic field often happens in less than 30 minutes.

SoHO has made it possible to improve the resolution and temporal cadence of these observations. Schrijver et al. (1997) have studied the evolution of the photospheric magnetic field from recent MDI data; their observations note that magnetic flux emerges, collides with opposite polarity flux and cancels on time scales of the order of minutes to hours. MDI and EIT recently ran a joint campaign (10-OCT-97 14:00 to 14-OCT-97 03:00GMT) collecting MDI and EIT partial-frame images in the MDI high resolution field of view. MDI cadence was nominally one image per minute. EIT collected one image in the 195 A channel every 7-8 minutes.