We report on the rare eruption of a miniature Hα filament that took the form of a surge. The filament first underwent a full development within 46 min and then began to erupt 9 min later, followed by a compact, impulsive X-ray class M2.2 flare with a two-ribbon nature only at the early eruption phase. During the eruption, its top rose, whereas the two legs remained rooted in the chromosphere and showed little swelling perpendicular to the rising direction. This led to a surge-like eruption with a narrow angular extent. Similar to the recent observations for standard and blowout X- ray jets by Moore et al., we thus define it as a "blowout Hα surge." Furthermore, our observations showed that the eruption was associated with (1) a coronal mass ejection guided by a pre-existing streamer, (2) abrupt, significant, and persistent changes in the photospheric magnetic field around the filament, and (3) a sudden disappearance of a small pore. These observations thus provide evidence that a blowout surge is a small- scale version of a large-scale filament eruption in many aspects. Our observations further suggest that at least part of the Hα surges belong to blowout-type cases, and the exact distinction between the standard and blowout Hα surges is important in understanding their different origins and associated eruptive phenomena.
Jia-Yan YangYun-Chun JiangDan YangYi BiBo YangRui-Sheng ZhengJun-Chao Hong
Based on the auroral electron/ion precipitation boundary database observed by the DMSP satellites during 1984–2009, the characteristics of the nightside equatorial boundaries of the electron precipitation(B1E) and the ion precipitation(B1I) in the Northern/Southern Hemispheres(NH/SH) are statistically investigated. The results show: That most of the boundaries are located between magnetic latitude(MLAT) of 60°–70° with the mean MLAT for B1E/B1 I to be 64.30°N/63.22°N and 64.48°S/63.26°S in the NH and SH, respectively, indicating that B1 E and B1 I in both hemispheres are located in conjugated magnetic field lines with B1 E ~1.2° poleward of B1I; that the MLAT of B1 E and B1 I in both hemispheres shift to lower MLAT(from ~70° to ~55°) as geomagnetic activity increases; that MLAT of both B1 E and B1 I and their differences slowly decrease from dusk to midnight with some difference in both hemispheres during different levels of geomagnetic activities; that B1 E and B1 I in both hemisphere decrease linearly with Kp and exponentially with Dst, AE, and SYM-H, respectively, demonstrating that auroral particle precipitation is closely related with geomagnetic activity; that in different magnetic local time(MLT) sectors, the changing rates of the boundaries with Kp are different, and the rates of B1 E are generally larger than that of B1 I, implying that the difference between B1 E and B1 I reduce with increasing geomagnetic activity. Compared with previous studies, the statistical results based on the long-term large database in this paper can well reflect the properties of the equatorial boundaries of auroral precipitation and may be used for physical modeling or space weather forecasting in future.