Click for movie. Also available on YouTube.
SCIA Reveals Transient Coronal Hole
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The Hinode XRT Synoptic Composite Image Archive (SCIA) is a comprehensive record of the X-ray Sun since late 2006. The archived images provide a quick history of solar activity through the daily and monthly layout pages and long-term data for morphological and quantitative studies of the X-ray corona. I created three movies (see below) of the 2015 December Synoptic archive and observed an interesting feature highlighted in the above movie. Just left to the center of the Sun lies a bright cusp loop which dissipates by the next synoptic image, 12 hours later. This dark region changes shape over the course of the next day. To see what is happening in this area, I downloaded magnetic field data from the website, The Sun Today and combined it with the corresponding XRT images. Above, is the combined image where closed coronal magnetic field lines are shown along with the places where it points into the Sun (black) or out of the Sun (white). There are no lines going into or out of the dark patch. The dark patch eventually gets filled with hot plasma and the coronal hole is gone. SCIA December 2015 Synoptic movies: Al_mesh, Al_poly, and Be_thin.
XRT PFSS 2015 December 19, XRT PFSS 2015 December 20
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(Prepared by Patricia Jibben)
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