Micro-sigmoids as progenitors of coronal jets: Is eruptive activity self-similarly multi-scaled?

Abstract

Observations from the X-ray telescope (XRT) on Hinode are used to study the nature of X-ray-bright points, sources of coronal jets. Several jet events in the coronal holes are found to erupt from small-scale, S-shaped bright regions. This finding suggests that coronal micro-sigmoids may well be progenitors of coronal jets. Moreover, the presence of these structures may explain numerous observed characteristics of jets such as helical structures, apparent transverse motions, and shapes. Analogous to large-scale sigmoids giving rise to coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a promising future task would perhaps be to investigate whether solar eruptive activity, from coronal jets to CMEs, is self-similar in terms of properties and instability mechanisms. © 2010. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.