Observational evidence of magnetic reconnection in solar X-ray jets

Abstract

The solar X-ray jets are one of the most interesting findings of Soft X-Ray Telescope(SXT) aboard Yohkoh. They are transitory X-ray enhancements with an apparent collimated motion. In this paper, we present the observational evidence of magnetic reconnection of solar X-ray jets. From the morphological study of solar X-ray jets using SXT, we found the following properties of solar X-ray jets. 1) Most X-ray jets are associated with flares (microflares - flares) at their footpoints. 2) When the active regions at the footpoint of jets can be resolved well, it is found that morphology changes significantly during jets. 3) 27% of the jets show a gap (> 10 4 km) between the exact footpoint of the jet and the brightest part of the associated flare. Furthermore, as a result of the co-alignment between magnetograms and SXT images, we found that the jet-producing region are the mixed polarity region and the region of evolving magnetic flux (increasing or decreasing). Canfield et al. (1996) investigated some Hα surges which were associated with X-ray jets and found some new Hα phenomena (moving-blueshift feature, converging footpoint motion). They suggested that these phenomena are the results of magnetic reconnection. As the results, we propose that the solar X-ray jets are produced by energy input from the (micro)flares which are generated by magnetic reconnection.