RADIO EVIDENCE OF BREAK-OUT RECONNECTION?

Abstract

We reconsider the 2003 October 28 X17 flare/coronal mass ejection (CME), studying the five minutes immediately before the impulsive flare phase (not discussed in previous work). To this aim we examine complementary dynamic radio spectrograms, single frequency polarimeter records, radio images, space-based longitudinal field magnetograms, and ultraviolet images. We find widely distributed faint and narrowband meter wave radio sources located outside active regions but associated with the boundaries of magnetic flux connectivity cells, inferred from the potential extrapolation of the observed photospheric longitudinal field as a model for coronal magnetic field structures. The meter wave radio sources occur during the initial decimeter wave effects, which are well known to be associated with filament destabilization in the flaring active region (here NOAA 10486). Antiochos et al. predict in their break-out model for CME initiation that huge phenomena ... may be controlled by detailed plasma processes that occur in relatively tiny regions. They suggest that the expected faint energy release on long field lines far away from any neutral line ... may be detectable in radio/microwave emission from nonthermal particles... In this paper, we describe meter wave sources whose properties correctly coincide with the quoted predictions of the break-out reconnection model of the CME initiation.