On-disk coronal rain

Small and elongated, cool and dense blob-like structures are being reported with high resolution telescopes in physically different regions throughout the solar atmosphere. Their detection and the understanding of their formation, morphology and thermodynamical characteristics can provide important information on their hosting environment, especially concerning the magnetic field, whose understanding constitutes a major problem in solar physics. An example of such blobs is coronal rain, a phenomenon of thermal non- equilibrium observed in active region loops, which consists of cool and dense chromospheric blobs falling along loop-like paths from coronal heights. So far, only off-limb coronal rain has been observed and few reports on the phenomenon exist. In the present work, several datasets of on-disk H{\alpha} observations with the CRisp Imaging SpectroPolarimeter (CRISP) at the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) are analyzed. A special family of on-disk blobs is selected for each dataset and a statistical analysis is carried out on their dynamics, morphology and temperatures. All characteristics present distributions which are very similar to reported coronal rain statistics. We discuss possible interpretations considering other similar blob-like structures reported so far and show that a coronal rain interpretation is the most likely one. Their chromospheric nature and the projection effects (which eliminate all direct possibility of height estimation) on one side, and their small sizes, fast dynamics, and especially, their faint character (offering low contrast with the background intensity) on the other side, are found as the main causes for the absence until now of the detection of this on-disk coronal rain counterpart.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for Solar Physic

Reconnection brightenings in the quiet solar photosphere

We describe a new quiet-Sun phenomenon which we call quiet-Sun Ellerman-like brightenings (QSEB). QSEBs are similar to Ellerman bombs (EB) in some respects but differ significantly in others. EBs are transient brightenings of the wings of the Balmer Hα line that mark strong-field photospheric reconnection in complex active regions. QSEBs are similar but smaller and less intense Balmer-wing brightenings that occur in quiet areas away from active regions. In the Hα wing, we measure typical lengths of less than 0.5 arcsec, widths of 0.23 arcsec, and lifetimes of less than a minute. We discovered them using high-quality Hα imaging spectrometry from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) and show that, in lesser-quality data, they cannot be distinguished from more ubiquitous facular brightenings, nor in the UV diagnostics currently available from space platforms. We add evidence from concurrent SST spectropolarimetry that QSEBs also mark photospheric reconnection events, but in quiet regions on the solar surface