Direct Observation of High-Speed Plasma Outflows Produced by Magnetic Reconnection in Solar Impulsive Events

Wang, Tongjiang, Linhui Sui, and Jiong Qiu, Direct Observation of High-Speed Plasma Outflows Produced by Magnetic Reconnection in Solar Impulsive Events, ApJ, 661, L207-L210 (2007) (ADS)

The cartoon

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An illustration of yet another confirmation of the cshkp geometry, and an important one: the high-resolution SUMER spectrograph was pretty much forbidden to study solar flares, owing to detector degradation, but sometimes it observed the corona above a flare serendipitously. SUMER sees Fe XVIII in a narrow source situated about where a current sheet geometrically should be. Note that this observation had been anticipated as long ago as 1977, with most of the key physical parameters quite well estimated.

Date: 2020 August 20