Propagating slow sausage waves in a sunspot observed by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope

Abstract

A sunspot is an ideal waveguide for a variety of magnetohydrodynamic waves, which carry a significant amount of energy to the upper atmosphere and could be used as a tool to probe the magnetic and thermal structure of a sunspot. In this study, we used the New Vacuum Solar Telescope and took high-resolution image sequences simultaneously in both TiO (7058±10 Å) and Hα (6562±2.5 Å) bandpasses. We extracted the area and total emission intensity variations of sunspot umbra and analyzed the signals with synchrosqueezing transform. We found that the area and emission intensity varied with both three and five minute periodicity. Moreover, the area and intensity oscillated in phase with each other, this fact hold in both TiO and Hα data. We interpret this oscillatory signal as a propagating slow sausage wave. The propagation speed is estimated at about 8 km s−1. We infer that this sunspot’s umbra could have temperature as low as 2800–3500 K.