Coronal Jets from Minifilament Eruptions in Active Regions

Solar coronal jets are transient (frequently of lifetime 10 min) features that shoot out from near the solar surface, become much longer than their width, and occur in all solar regions, including coronal holes, quiet Sun, and active regions (e.g., Shimojo et al. 1996, Certain et al. 2007). Sterling et al. (2015) and other studies found that in coronal holes and in quiet Sun the jets result when small-scale filaments, called ``minifilaments,'' erupt onto nearby open or high-reaching field lines. Additional studies found that coronal-jet-onset locations (and hence presumably the minifilament-eruption-onset locations) coincided with locations of magnetic-flux cancellation. For active region (AR) jets however the situation is less clear. Sterling et al. (2016) studied jets in one active region over a 24-hour period; they found that some AR jets indeed resulted from minifilament eruptions, usually originating from locations of episodes of magnetic-flux cancelation. In some cases however they could not determine whether flux was emerging or canceling at the polarity inversion line from which the minifilament erupted; and for other jets of that region minifilaments were not conclusively apparent prior to jet occurrence. Here we further study AR jets, by observing them in a single AR over a one-week period, using X-ray images from Hinode/XRT and EUV/UV images from SDO/AIA, and line-of-sight magnetograms and white-light intensity-grams from SDO/HMI. We initially identified 13 prominent jets in the XRT data, and examined corresponding AIA and HMI data. For at least several of the jets, our findings are consistent with the jets resulting from minifilament eruptions, and originating from sights of magnetic-field cancelation. Thus our findings support that, at least in many cases, AR coronal jets result from the same physical processes that produce coronal jets in quiet-Sun and coronal-hole regions. FM was supportedby the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at NASA/MSFC and the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Additional support was from the NASA HGI program and the Hinode project.