Acceleration of Coronal Mass Ejections in the Low Solar Corona

Advisor: Jiong Qiu

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are spectacular energy release events in the Sun's atmosphere. It is understood that the energy to fuel CMEs is provided by the Sun's magnetic field. Prior to the eruption, the magnetic field evolves and accumulates magnetic energy and stress till a critical point when the configuration loses stability and explodes, allowing the field to restructure and relax to a lower energy state. The explosively released magnetic energy is converted into the kinetic energy of CMEs, as well as the plasma and particle energy in flares, which are often observed to occur together with CMEs.

At the CME eruption, a physical process, called magnetic reconnection, must be taking place to rapidly change the way magnetic field lines connect to the Sun's surface and finally release the CME into interplanetary space. It is less clear whether reconnection also plays the critical role of triggering the eruption, and how the progress of the CME acceleration is related to magnetic reconnection. In this project, we will look for signatures of magnetic reconnection prior to and in the early stage of CME eruptions, and analyze properties of magnetic reconnection and CME acceleration. We take advantage of the state-of-the-art observations by several spacecraft, SDO, STEREO, and SoHO, that observe the Sun's corona from different view angles. These combined observations make it possible to track CME evolution in the low corona, where significant CME acceleration takes place, and at the same time, measure magnetic reconnection from flare and magnetic field observations using a method developed by the MSU team.

In this project, student will write or use computer programs to analyze astronomical images of various kinds and extract physical properties from observations. Student will learn about the Sun's atmosphere and magnetic fields. Experience with IDL or similar programming languages is desired though not required.

You can read about related REU projects in 2018 .