Macrospicules and Their Connection to Magnetic Reconnection in the Lower Solar Atmosphere

Abstract

Solar macrospicules are beam-like cool plasma ejections of size in between spicules and coronal jets, which can elucidate potential connections between plasma jetting activity at different scales. With high-resolution observations from the New Vacuum Solar Telescope and Solar Dynamics Observatory, we investigate the origin of five groups of recurrent active-region macrospicules. Before the launch of each macrospicule, we detect a compact bright patch (BP) at its base where a newly emerging dipole contacts and cancel with the preexisting ambient field. The spectral diagnosis from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph at one of BPs reveals signatures of reconnection at the lower atmosphere. Multiwavelength imaging of these BPs show that they mainly occur at the rising phase of the flux emergence and slowly ascend from the lower to the upper chromosphere. Remarkable macrospicules occur and fade out once the BPs appear and decay from the AIA 304 Å images, respectively. We suggest that these macrospicules and related BPs form in a common reconnection process, in which the increasing reconnection height between the emerging dipole and the ambient field results in the observed variations from BPs to macrospicules. Interestingly, most macrospicules show similar characteristics to larger-scale coronal jets and/or smaller-scale spicules, i.e., the rotating motions, the presence of minifilaments and BPs before the eruptions, and magnetic flux emergence and cancellation. We conclude that the formation mechanism of macrospicules should be the same as spicules and coronal jets, i.e., solar jetting phenomena at different scales share the same physical mechanism in association with magnetic reconnection.

Keywords

• Solar chromosphere
• Solar activity
• Solar spicules
• Solar magnetic reconnection