Emerging dimmings of active regions observed by SDO

Jun Zhang, Shuhong Yang, Yang Liu, Xudong Sun

Published 2012-10-17Version 1

With the observations from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly and the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager aboard the \emph{Solar Dynamics Observatory}, we statistically investigate the emerging dimmings (EDs) of 24 isolated active regions (IARs) from June 2010 to May 2011. All the IARs present EDs in lower temperature lines (e.g., 171 {\AA}) at their early emerging stages, meanwhile in higher temperature lines (e.g., 211 {\AA}), the ED regions brighten continuously. There are two type of EDs: fan-shaped and halo-shaped. There are 19 fan-shaped EDs and 5 halo-shaped ones. The EDs appear several to more than ten hours delay to the first emergence of the IARs. The shortest delay is 3.6 hr and the longest 19.0 hr. The EDs last from 3.3 hr to 14.2 hr, with a mean duration of 8.3 hr. Before the appearance of the EDs, the emergence rate of the magnetic flux of the IARs is from 1.2 $\times$ 10$^{19}$ Mx hr$^{-1}$ to 1.4 $\times$ 10$^{20}$ Mx hr$^{-1}$. The larger the emergence rate is, the shorter the delay time is. While the dimmings appear, the magnetic flux of the IARs ranges from 8.8 $\times$ 10$^{19}$ Mx to 1.3 $\times$ 10$^{21}$ Mx. These observations imply that the reconfiguration of the coronal magnetic fields due to reconnection between the newly-emerging flux and the surrounding existing fields results in a new thermal distribution which leads to a dimming for the cooler channel (171 {\AA}) and brightnening in the warmer channels.