English

Morphological study of penumbral formation

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-06-22 v1

Abstract

Penumbrae are known to be area of mainly horizontal magnetic field surrounding umbrae of relatively large and mature sunspots. In this paper, we observationally studied the formation of penumbrae in NOAA10978, where several penumbral formations were observed in G-band images of SOT/Hinode. Thanks to the continuous observation by Hinode, we could morphologically follow the evolution of sunspots and found that there are several paths to the penumbral formation: (1) Active accumulation of magnetic flux, (2) Rapid emergence of magnetic field, and (3) Appearance of twisted or rotating magnetic tubes. In all of these cases, magnetic fields are expected to sustain high inclination at the edges of flux tube concentration longer than the characteristic growth time of downward magnetic pumping.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.4573,
  title  = {Morphological study of penumbral formation},
  author = {Reizaburo Kitai and Hiroko Watanabe and Ken'ichi Otsuji},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4573},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

accepted for publication in PASJ

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:06:17.653Z