Dynamics of the solar magnetic bright points derived from their horizontal motions

Abstract

The sub-arcsec bright points (BP) associated with the small scale magnetic fields in the lower solar atmosphere are advected by the evolution of the photospheric granules. We measure various quantities related to the horizontal motions of the BPs observed in two wavelengths, including the velocity auto-correlation function. A 1 hr time sequence of wideband H$\alpha$ observations conducted at the \textit{Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope} (\textit{SST}), and a 4 hr \textit{Hinode} \textit{G}-band time sequence observed with the Solar Optical telescope are used in this work. We follow 97 \textit{SST} and 212 \textit{Hinode} BPs with 3800 and 1950 individual velocity measurements respectively. For its high cadence of 5 s as compared to 30 s for \textit{Hinode} data, we emphasize more on the results from \textit{SST} data. The BP positional uncertainty achieved by \textit{SST} is as low as 3 km. The position errors contribute 0.75 km$^2$ s$^{-2}$ to the variance of the observed velocities. The \textit{raw} and \textit{corrected} velocity measurements in both directions, i.e., $(v_x,v_y)$, have Gaussian distributions with standard deviations of $(1.32,1.22)$ and $(1.00, 0.86)$ km s$^{-1}$ respectively. The BP motions have correlation times of about $22 - 30$ s. We construct the power spectrum of the horizontal motions as a function of frequency, a quantity that is useful and relevant to the studies of generation of Alfv\'en waves. Photospheric turbulent diffusion at time scales less than 200 s is found to satisfy a power law with an index of 1.59.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. 24 pages, 9 figures, and 1 movie (not included