The relation of Ca II K features to magnetic field

Abstract

We studied quantitatively the relation between the intensity of Caii K-line bright features and the intensity of the associated magnetic elements using two data sets obtained at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. Both network and intranetwork (IN) structures were considered. Magnetic field changes always affected the K-line emission; for example, the appearance of new bipoles was always followed by enhanced K-line emission. There is an almost linear correlation between the K-line intensity and the magnetic field strength of the stronger network elements (elements with absolute field strength higher than 11–19.5 G). We identified two classes of intranetwork K-line elements: magnetic and non-magnetic ones. The number of the magnetic K-line IN elements above a 1-sigma threshold was only 5%–10% of the number of the non-magnetic ones. The magnetic K-line IN elements were almost 3 to 4 times brighter compared to the non-magnetic elements. On the other hand, the non-magnetic elements were moving with typical velocities of 35–40 km s⁻¹ while the velocities of the magnetic K-line elements were of the order of 1 km s⁻¹.

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