Series of flares from super-active active region 13576. Click the image to see the movie or click here for the youtube version.
A Sparkling Active Region: AR13576
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As the year progressed, so did the Sun’s activity. During February, the Sun popped off hundreds of solar flares. One of the active regions (ARs) that was particularly active and watched by the XRT team was designated AR13576 which erupted in 125 flares from February 3rd to the 16th. Most of the flaring activity in the video were C-class flares, which are lower level solar flares. There were 23 M-class flares, the next level up from C-class flares. Finally, right as AR13576 rotated off the West Limb, there was an X2.3 class flare. X-class flares are extremely powerful flares. A plot of the flares during this time can be found here. This flare occurred around 06:30UT on February the 16th. Throughout the video, AR13576 has gorgeous loops and pops. Despite all of this activity, the AR failed to spark a large Earth directed geomagnetic storm. The Hinode XRT team watched the AR as it traveled the solar disk starting February 6th until the 16th. Over the video there are a few breaks to observe other parts of the Sun, due to traversing the South Atlantic Anomaly where we shelter the instrument’s sensor, or to remove some of the contamination layer from our CCD sensor by opening the instrument to the Sun without exposing the delicate filters. Contamination can be seen in the video. This is a normal part of observation satellites in space. Team members create dust maps to remove the spotting from images, however, the contamination changes over time. In this video, we observed using XRT’s Al-poly filter which is thin and allows for thin loop observation. AR13576 was a beautiful and sparkling region to keep an eye on. Keywords: AR Tracking, Flare Filters: Al_Poly |
(Prepared by Rhiannon Fleming and Aki Takeda)
The XRT instrument team is comprised of SAO, NASA, JAXA, and NAOJ.
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