The visual complexity of coronal mass ejections

Shannon Jones - University of Reading; Chris Scott - University of Reading, United Kingdom; Luke Barnard - University of Reading, United Kingdom; Roger Highfield - Science Museum Group, United Kingdom; Chris Lintott - University of Oxford, United Kingdom; Elisabeth Baeten - Zooniverse, United Kingdom

Session: Interplanetary CMEs and Solar Particle Events

Abstract

The Heliospheric Imagers (HI) on board NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft show that Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) can be visually complex structures. To explore this complexity, we ranked 1,110 CMEs observed by HI based entirely on how "complicated" they appeared to citizen scientists. We found that; (a) the average visual complexity of CMEs varies with the solar cycle, with a higher level of complexity observed at solar maximum; and (b) on average, CMEs observed by STEREO-A were significantly more complex than those observed by STEREO-B. Here we investigate the appearance of more complex, or complicated CMEs.