Bibcode
Bonet, J. A.; Márquez, I.; Sánchez-Almeida, J.; Palacios, J.; Martínez Pillet, V.; Solanki, S. K.; del Toro Iniesta, J. C.; Domingo, V.; Berkefeld, T.; Schmidt, W.; Gandorfer, A.; Barthol, P.; Knölker, M.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 723, Issue 2, pp. L139-L143 (2010).
Advertised on:
11
2010
Citations
115
Refereed citations
102
Description
We characterize the observational properties of the convectively driven
vortex flows recently discovered on the quiet Sun, using magnetograms,
Dopplergrams, and images obtained with the 1 m balloon-borne SUNRISE
telescope. By visual inspection of time series, we find some 3.1 ×
10-3 vortices Mm-2 minute-1, which is a
factor of ~1.7 larger than previous estimates. The mean duration of the
individual events turns out to be 7.9 minutes, with a standard deviation
of 3.2 minutes. In addition, we find several events appearing at the
same locations along the duration of the time series (31.6 minutes).
Such recurrent vortices show up in the proper motion flow field map
averaged over the time series. The typical vertical vorticities are
lsim6 × 10-3 s-1, which corresponds to a
period of rotation of some 35 minutes. The vortices show a preferred
counterclockwise sense of rotation, which we conjecture may have to do
with the preferred vorticity impinged by the solar differential
rotation.
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Tobías
Felipe García