Observational evidence for two-component distributions describing solar magnetic bright points

¹ Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
e-mail: yberrioss@unal.edu.co
² Institute of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
³ Computational Neurosciences, Neuromed Campus, Kepler University Hospital, Linz, Austria
e-mail: dominik.utz@kepleruniklinikum.at
⁴ Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía IAA-CSIC, Granada, Spain
⁵ Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Observatorio Astronómico Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia
e-mail: svargasd@unal.edu.co
⁶ University of Graz, Graz, Austria
⁷ Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain
⁸ Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
⁹ Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia
¹⁰ Leibniz – Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Received: 30 April 2021
Accepted: 30 September 2021

Abstract

Context. High-resolution observations of the solar photosphere reveal the presence of fine structures, in particular the so-called Magnetic Bright Points (MBPs), which are small-scale features associated with strong magnetic field regions of the order of kilogauss (kG). It is especially relevant to study these magnetic elements, which are extensively detected in all moments during the solar cycle, in order to establish their contribution to the behavior of the solar atmosphere, and ultimately a plausible role within the coronal heating problem.

Aims. Characterisation of size and velocity distributions of MBPs in the solar photosphere in two different datasets of quiet Sun images acquired with high-resolution solar instruments i.e. Solar Optical Telescope SOT/Hinode and the High-resolution Fast Imager HiFI/GREGOR, in the G-band (4308 Å).

Methods. In order to detect the MBPs, an automatic segmentation and identification algorithm is used. Next, the identified features were tracked to measure their proper motions. Finally, a statistical analysis of hundreds of MBPs is carried out, generating histograms for areas, diameters and horizontal velocities.

Results. This work establishes that areas and diameters of MBPs display log-normal distributions that are well-fitted by two different components, whereas the velocity vector components follow Gaussians and the vector magnitude a Rayleigh distribution revealing again for all vector elements a two component composition.

Conclusions. The results can be interpreted as due to the presence of two different populations of MBPs in the solar photosphere one likely related to stronger network magnetic flux elements and the other one to weaker intranetwork flux elemens. In particular this work concludes on the effect of the different spatial resolution of GREGOR and Hinode telescopes, affecting detections and average values.