TY - JOUR
T1 - HOW DID A MAJOR CONFINED FLARE OCCUR in SUPER SOLAR ACTIVE REGION 12192?
AU - Jiang, Chaowei
AU - Wu, S. T.
AU - Yurchyshyn, Vasyl
AU - Wang, Haimin
AU - Feng, Xueshang
AU - Hu, Qiang
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by NSF AGS-1153323, AGS-1062050, and in addition C.J. and X.F. are also supported by the 973 program under grant 2012CB825601, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZZD-EW-01-4), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41204126, 41231068, 41274192, 41531073, 41374176, 41574170, and 41574171), and the Specialized Research Fund for State Key Laboratories and Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (2015122). V.Y. acknowledges support from AFOSR FA9550-15-1-0322 and NSF AGS-1250818 grants and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. HW acknowledges support from NSF AGS-1348513, AGS-1408703. Data from observations are courtesy of NASA SDO/AIA and the HMI science teams. We thank the anonymous referee for help of improving the manuscript. We thank International Space Science Institute (ISSI) for enabling interesting discussions
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - We study the physical mechanism of a major X-class solar flare that occurred in the super NOAA active region (AR) 12192 using data-driven numerical magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modeling complemented with observations. With the evolving magnetic fields observed at the solar surface as bottom boundary input, we drive an MHD system to evolve self-consistently in correspondence with the realistic coronal evolution. During a two-day time interval, the modeled coronal field has been slowly stressed by the photospheric field evolution, which gradually created a large-scale coronal current sheet, i.e., a narrow layer with intense current, in the core of the AR. The current layer was successively enhanced until it became so thin that a tether-cutting reconnection between the sheared magnetic arcades was set in, which led to a flare. The modeled reconnecting field lines and their footpoints match well the observed hot flaring loops and the flare ribbons, respectively, suggesting that the model has successfully "reproduced" the macroscopic magnetic process of the flare. In particular, with simulation, we explained why this event is a confined eruption-the consequence of the reconnection is a shared arcade instead of a newly formed flux rope. We also found a much weaker magnetic implosion effect compared to many other X-class flares.
AB - We study the physical mechanism of a major X-class solar flare that occurred in the super NOAA active region (AR) 12192 using data-driven numerical magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modeling complemented with observations. With the evolving magnetic fields observed at the solar surface as bottom boundary input, we drive an MHD system to evolve self-consistently in correspondence with the realistic coronal evolution. During a two-day time interval, the modeled coronal field has been slowly stressed by the photospheric field evolution, which gradually created a large-scale coronal current sheet, i.e., a narrow layer with intense current, in the core of the AR. The current layer was successively enhanced until it became so thin that a tether-cutting reconnection between the sheared magnetic arcades was set in, which led to a flare. The modeled reconnecting field lines and their footpoints match well the observed hot flaring loops and the flare ribbons, respectively, suggesting that the model has successfully "reproduced" the macroscopic magnetic process of the flare. In particular, with simulation, we explained why this event is a confined eruption-the consequence of the reconnection is a shared arcade instead of a newly formed flux rope. We also found a much weaker magnetic implosion effect compared to many other X-class flares.
KW - Sun: corona
KW - Sun: flares
KW - galaxies: magnetic fields
KW - magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)
KW - methods: numerical
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U2 - 10.3847/0004-637X/828/1/62
DO - 10.3847/0004-637X/828/1/62
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84987898644
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 828
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 62
ER -