Statistical Study of Coronal Mass Ejection Source Locations: Understanding CMEs Viewed in Coronagraphs

TL;DR

This study analyzes the source locations of 1078 CMEs observed by LASCO during 1997-1998, revealing insights into their recognition rates, physical properties, causes of halo appearances, and deflection behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of CME source locations and their correlation with apparent parameters, addressing key physical issues in CME observation and interpretation.

Findings

32% of front-side CMEs are unrecognized by SOHO

CME brightness correlates positively with speed

Mass estimates from brightness may be overestimated

Abstract

How to properly understand coronal mass ejections (CMEs) viewed in white-light coronagraphs is crucial to many relative researches in solar and space physics. The issue is now particularly addressed in this paper through studying the source locations of all the 1078 LASCO CMEs listed in CDAW CME catalog during 1997 -- 1998 and their correlation with CMEs' apparent parameters. By manually checking LASCO and EIT movies of these CMEs, we find that, except 231 CMEs whose source locations can not be identified due to poor data, there are 288 CMEs with location identified on the front-side solar disk, 234 CMEs appearing above solar limb, and 325 CMEs without evident eruptive signatures in the field of view of EIT. Based on the statistical results of CMEs' source locations, four physical issues, including (1) the missing rate of CMEs by SOHO LASCO and EIT, (2) the mass of CMEs, (3) the causes of halo CMEs and (4) the deflections of CMEs in the corona, are exhaustively analyzed. It is found that (1) about 32% of front-side CMEs can not be recognized by SOHO, (2) the brightness of a CME at any heliocentric distance is roughly positively correlated with its speed, and the CME mass derived from the brightness is probably overestimated, (3) both projection effect and violent eruption are the major causes of halo CMEs, and especially for limb halo CMEs, the latter is the primary one, (4) most CMEs deflected towards equator near the solar minimum, and these deflections can be classified into three types, the asymmetrical expansion, non-radial ejection, and the deflected propagation.