Three-dimensional Magnetic Structures of Ellerman Bombs revealed by SUNRISE III/SCIP
Abstract
Ellerman bombs (EBs) are widely recognized as photospheric and chromospheric signatures of magnetic reconnection. However, the three-dimensional (3D) magnetic topology has remained elusive due to the lack of seamless height coverage in observations. Here, we present initial results from the SUNRISE III/SCIP (Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectroPolarimeter) observations of an emerging flux region. Exploiting the seeing-free, high-spatial-resolution observations provided by the 1-meter balloon-borne telescope, SCIP achieved seamless multi-line spectropolarimetry from the photosphere to the lower chromosphere. We analyzed the multi-line Stokes profiles of the photospheric Fe I and K I lines and the chromospheric Ca II lines, and applied the Weak Field Approximation to the K I and Ca II lines to reconstruct the 3D magnetic field structure. The blue- and red-wing brightenings of the Ca II 8542 {\AA} line appear at spatially offset locations, indicating bi-directional reconnection flows. The reconstructed 3D magnetic field reveals that the opposite-polarity field structure reaches different heights in the two events analyzed. In one event, it is confined to the lower layers and is absent at the formation height of Ca II 8542 {\AA} core, which shows no intensity enhancement, whereas in the other event it extends up to the Ca II 8542 {\AA} core formation height, where enhanced line-core intensity is also observed. We interpret this as the reconnection current sheet reaching different altitudes. These results demonstrate that SCIP has successfully resolved the 3D structure of EBs, distinguishing magnetic reconnection events occurring at different atmospheric heights.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.00619,
title = {Three-dimensional Magnetic Structures of Ellerman Bombs revealed by SUNRISE III/SCIP},
author = {Yusuke Kawabata and Yukio Katsukawa and Masahito Kubo and Takayoshi Oba and Takuma Matsumoto and Ryohtaroh T. Ishikawa and Yoshihiro Naito and Hirohisa Hara and Toshifumi Shimizu and Fumihiro Uraguchi and Toshihiro Tsuzuki and Kazuya Shinoda and Tomonori Tamura and Yoshinori Suematsu and Carlos Quintero Noda and Jose Carlos del Toro Iniesta and David Orozco Suárez and María Balaguer Jimenez and Sami K. Solanki and Andreas Lagg and Achim Gandorfer and Pietro Bernasconi and Thomas Berkefeld and Alex Feller and Tino L. Riethmüller and Alberto Álvarez-Herrero and H. N. Smitha and Bianca Grauf and Michael Carpenter and Alexander Bell and Valentín Martínez Pillet and Francisco Javier Bailén and Julian Blanco Rodríguez and Juan Sebastián Castellanos Durán and Edvarda Harnes and Johannes Hoelken and Francisco A. Iglesias and Azaymi L. Siu-Tapia and Hanna Strecker and Dušan Vukadinović},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00619},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. An animation of Figure 1 is included as an ancillary file