IU undergraduate Robbie Mailliard, who spent the summer at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Alabama at Huntsville as an REU student, attended this fall’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D. C., to present his research on the Sun. The AGU draws some 25,000 geophysicists from more than 100 countries.
Robbie’s poster, “Examining a Possible Connection between Solar Coronal Jets and Solar Plumes,” investigated the connection between jets and plumes using extreme ultraviolet images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Solar plumes are tall funnel-like features extending high into the solar corona with lifetimes of many hours to a few days. Solar coronal jets are usually narrower coronal features that have comparatively short lifetimes of a few tens of minutes at most. Robbie looked at images from the regions were plumes emerged to see whether any jets appeared from around six hours before plume formation until peak plume intensity. He tracked the locations of the jets with respect to the plume’s base, as well as their outflow speeds, and magnetic fluxes. Robbie was able to find three weak jets preceding one of the plumes, but found no jets preceding the other three plumes he examined. They concluded that plumes likely do not originate from prominent coronal jets. Nice work, Robbie!
The College of Arts