The Mechanism for the Energy Buildup Driving Solar Eruptive Events

TL;DR

This paper uses magnetohydrodynamic simulations to demonstrate that magnetic stress in the Sun's corona accumulates locally in low-lying magnetic flux, leading to filament channel formation and solar eruptive events, challenging previous assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation approach that preserves magnetic helicity, revealing that local stress buildup occurs despite stochastic reconnection, explaining filament channel formation.

Findings

Magnetic stress accumulates locally in the corona.

Filament channels form through coherent shearing of magnetic fields.

The mechanism explains the origin of solar eruptive events.

Abstract

The underlying origin of solar eruptive events (SEEs), ranging from giant coronal mass ejections to small coronal-hole jets, is that the lowest-lying magnetic flux in the Sun's corona undergoes the continual buildup of stress and free energy. This magnetic stress has long been observed as the phenomenon of "filament channels:" strongly sheared magnetic field localized around photospheric polarity inversion lines. However, the mechanism for the stress buildup - the formation of filament channels - is still debated. We present magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a coronal volume that is driven by transient, cellular boundary flows designed to model the processes by which the photosphere drives the corona. The key feature of our simulations is that they accurately preserve magnetic helicity, the topological quantity that is conserved even in the presence of ubiquitous magnetic reconnection. Although small-scale random stress is injected everywhere at the photosphere, driving stochastic reconnection throughout the corona, the net result of the magnetic evolution is a coherent shearing of the lowest-lying field lines. This highly counter-intuitive result - magnetic stress builds up locally rather than spreading out to attain a minimum energy state - explains the formation of filament channels and is the fundamental mechanism underlying SEEs. Furthermore, this mechanism may be relevant to other astrophysical or laboratory plasmas.