The Triggering Mechanism of Quiet-Region Coronal Jet Eruptions: Flux Cancelation

Coronal jets are frequent transient features on the Sun, observed in EUV and X-ray emissions. They occur in active regions, quiet Sun and coronal holes, and appear as a bright spire with base brightenings. Recent studies show that many coronal jets are driven by the eruption of a minifilament. Here we investigate the magnetic cause of jet-driving minifilament eruptions. We study ten randomly-found on-disk quiet-region coronal jets using SDO/AIA intensity images and SDO/HMI magnetograms. For all ten events, we track the evolution of photospheric magnetic flux in the jet-base region in EUV images and find that (a) a cool (transition-region temperature) minifilament is present prior to each jet eruption; (b) the pre-eruption minifilament resides above the polarity-inversion line between majority-polarity and minority-polarity magnetic flux patches; (c) the opposite-polarity flux patches converge and cancel with each other; (d) the cancelation between the majority-polarity and minority-polarity flux patches eventually destabilizes the field holding the minifilament to erupt outwards; (e) the envelope of the erupting field barges into ambient oppositely-directed far-reaching field and undergoes external reconnection (interchange reconnection); (f) the external reconnection opens the envelope field and the minifilament field inside, allowing reconnected-heated hot material and cool minifilament material to escape along the far-reaching field, producing the jet spire. In summary, we found that each of our ten jets resulted from a minifilament eruption following flux cancelation at the magnetic neutral line under the pre-eruption minifilament. These observations show that flux cancelation is usually the trigger of quiet-region coronal jet eruptions