Revealing the Inside of Coronal Mass Ejections

H. CREMADES; O. C. ST. CYR; G. STENBORG

Giardini Naxos, Italy

Congreso; SOHO 17: 10 Years of SOHO and Beyond; 2006

ESA/NASA

The magnetic nature of CMEs has become evident after the recurring identification of magnetic flux-rope structures in in-situ measurements. However, the flux rope can be directly discerned only in a small fraction of the vast events detected by the SOHO/LASCO experiment. These few events with visible flux rope characteristics originate mostly near the solar limb; in contrast to halo CMEs related to in-situ events, which originate near disk center. A general insight into the internal magnetic field configuration of CMEs is needed, in order to predict the location and orientationof the flux rope and ultimately its degree of geoeffectiveness. The inner structure of CMEs isrevealed with the help of a powerful image processing technique, based in a multi-level decomposition scheme that relies in the à trous wavelet transform. This way, linear and circular features found within CMEs can be unambiguously recognized and characterized, towards a better understanding of the CME magnetic field configuration.