LIGHT BRIDGE IN A DEVELOPING ACTIVE REGION. I. OBSERVATION OF LIGHT BRIDGE AND ITS DYNAMIC ACTIVITY PHENOMENA

Abstract

Light bridges, the bright structures that divide the umbra of sunspots and pores into smaller pieces, are known to produce wide variety of activity events in solar active regions (ARs). It is also known that the light bridges appear in the assembling process of nascent sunspots. The ultimate goal of this series of papers is to reveal the nature of light bridges in developing ARs and the occurrence of activity events associated with the light bridge structures from both observational and numerical approaches. In this first paper, exploiting the observational data obtained by Hinode, IRIS, and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), we investigate the detailed structure of the light bridge in NOAA AR 11974 and its dynamic activity phenomena. As a result, we find that the light bridge has a weak, horizontal magnetic field, which is transported from the interior by large-scale convective upflow and is surrounded by strong, vertical fields of adjacent pores. In the chromosphere above the bridge, a transient brightening occurs repeatedly and intermittently, followed by a recurrent dark surge ejection into higher altitudes. Our analysis indicates that the brightening is the plasma heating due to magnetic reconnection at lower altitudes, while the dark surge is the cool, dense plasma ejected from the reconnection region. From the observational results, we conclude that the dynamic activity observed in a light bridge structure such as chromospheric brightenings and dark surge ejections are driven by magnetoconvective evolution within the light bridge and its interaction with surrounding magnetic fields.