On the Chromospheric Micro-jets Associated with the Penumbral Filaments

We present observations of sunspot penumbrae obtained during the disk passage of AR 10923 (November 10--20, 2006) with the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on the Hinode satellite. Co-aligned multi-hour movies taken simultaneously in several wavelengths show fine-scale dynamics at the sub-arcsecond level. The dynamics include helical flows along penumbral filaments, branching of filaments, and penumbral "micro-jets" recently described by Katsukawa et al. (AAS 210, 94.13). We present quantitative analyzes of the penumbral jets and interpret them relative to our recent model of penumbral filaments (Ryutova, Berger and Title, 2007, in "Collective phenomena in macroscopic systems", Ed. G. Bertin, et al., World Scientific) to show that the jets are the result of magnetic reconnection of the helical field lines in neighboring non-collinear filaments.