Magnetic upflow events in the quiet-Sun photosphere. I. Observations

TL;DR

This study investigates magnetic upflow events in the quiet-Sun photosphere using high-resolution spectropolarimetric data, revealing their abundance, diverse profiles, and physical properties, with implications for understanding solar magnetic dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed classification and analysis of magnetic upflow events using high-quality observations, highlighting how detection methods influence observed properties.

Findings

MUEs are more numerous than previously reported.

Four classes of Stokes V profile shapes identified.

MUEs are found in both network and internetwork regions.

Abstract

Rapid magnetic upflows in the quiet-Sun photosphere were recently uncovered from both SUNRISE/IMaX and Hinode/SOT observations. Here, we study magnetic upflow events (MUEs) from high-quality, high- (spatial, temporal, and spectral) resolution, and full Stokes observations in four photospheric magnetically sensitive Fe I lines centered at 525.021, 617.334, 630.151, and 630.250 nm acquired with the Swedish Solar Telescope (SST)/CRISP. We detect MUEs by subtracting in-line Stokes V signals from those in far blue wing whose signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) >= 7. We find a larger number of MUEs at any given time (0.02 per square arcsec), larger by one to two orders of magnitude, than previously reported. The MUEs appear to fall into four classes presenting different shapes of Stokes V profiles with (I) asymmetric double lobes, (II) single lobes, (III) double-humped (two same-polarity lobes), and (IV) three lobes (an extra blue-shifted bump in addition to double-lobes), of which less than half are single-lobed. We also find that MUEs are almost equally distributed in network and internetwork areas and they appear in the interior or at the edge of granules in both regions. Distributions of physical properties, except that of horizontal velocity, of the MUEs (namely, Stokes V signal, size, line-of-sight velocity, and lifetime) are almost identical for the different spectral lines in our data. A bisector analysis of our spectrally resolved observations shows that these events host modest upflows and do not show direct indication of the presence of supersonic upflows reported earlier. Our findings reveal that numbers, types (classes), and properties determined for MUEs can strongly depend on the detection techniques used and the properties of the employed data, namely, S/Ns, resolutions, and wavelengths.