Chromospheric Dynamics of an Umbral Flare Kernel - Based on Coordinated SUNRISE III SCIP and Domeless Solar Telescope Observations
Abstract
We report imaging spectroscopic observations of an M1.4 solar flare obtained during a coordinated observation between the infrared spectropolarimeter SCIP onboard the SUNRISE-III balloon mission and Domeless Solar Telescope (DST) at Hida Observatory, Kyoto University. The flare that occurred on 2024 July 13 in NOAA Active Region 13738 exhibited a compact flare kernel located within a sunspot umbra. SCIP performed rapid slit-scan observations over a field of view of 58" x 58" around the umbra with a cadence of 40 s, covering infrared chromospheric and upper-photospheric lines including Ca II 8498/8542 A and K I D1. At the same time, DST observed a wider surrounding region with a cadence of 25 s in H-alpha, Ca II 8542 A, and Na I D1/D2. Clear flare-related brightenings are detected in all chromospheric lines observed by SCIP and DST, while no significant enhancement is found in photospheric lines. The high spatial resolution of SCIP reveals fine substructures within the kernel on spatial scales of order 1000 km, which appear smeared in ground-based observations. The spectral profiles exhibit temporally and spatially varying Doppler shifts and line broadenings, indicating complex, fine-scale plasma motions in the chromosphere. These results suggest that the observed red asymmetry arises from the temporal succession of multiple fine-scale kernels, as revealed by SCIP, rather than from a single continuous process.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.05977,
title = {Chromospheric Dynamics of an Umbral Flare Kernel - Based on Coordinated SUNRISE III SCIP and Domeless Solar Telescope Observations},
author = {Ayumi Asai and Satoru UeNo and Takuma Matsumoto and Takayoshi Oba and Yukio Katsukawa and Masahito Kubo and Ryohtaroh T. Ishikawa and Yusuke Kawabata and Hirohisa Hara and Yoshihiro Naito and Toshifumi Shimizu and Sami K. Solanki and Andreas Lagg and Achim Gandorfer and Jose Carlos del Toro Iniesta and Pietro Bernasconi and Thomas Berkefeld and Alex Feller and Tino L. Riethmuller and Alberto Alvarez-Herrero and H. N. Smitha and David Orozco Suarez and Bianca Grauf and Michael Carpenter and Alexander Bell and Valentin Martinez Pillet and Laurent Gizon and Francisco Javier Bailen and Julian Blanco Rodriguez and Juan Sebastian Castellanos Duran and Edvarda Harnes and Johannes Hoelken and Francisco A. Iglesias and Azaymi L. Siu-Tapia and Hanna Strecker and Dusan Vukadinovic and SUNRISE-III team},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.05977},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
11 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJL (a part of the Focus Issue on Sunrise III)