Magnetic properties of orphan penumbrae

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
² Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, PO Box 15400 FI-00076 Aalto, Finland

^⋆ Corresponding author: castellanos@mps.mpg.de

Received: 21 May 2025
Accepted: 9 July 2025

Abstract

Orphan penumbrae (OPU) are features resembling sunspot penumbrae, but are not connected to an umbra. Here we compare OPUs and sunspot penumbrae, including their filaments. We also identify and describe the main mechanisms for the formation of OPUs and we characterise their decay process. Our study is based on spectropolarimetric inversions of active regions observed with the Hinode spectropolarimeter. We manually identified 80 individual OPUs, allowing us to study them statistically. In addition, we analysed the time evolution of selected OPUs using data provided by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. Orphan penumbrae display a broad range of shapes, associated with typically Ω–shaped magnetic field configurations, where opposite polarity fields predominate at the two ends of the OPU. In addition, the properties of the OPU filaments are remarkably uniform between different OPUs, resembling the ones in sunspot penumbrae. Most OPUs form by either a patch of a penumbra separating from a sunspot, or by new magnetic flux emerging close to the polarity inversion line of an active region. We observe chromospheric fibrils above almost all OPUs in Hinode Hα images, indicating that a part of the magnetic field of the OPUs extends to the chromosphere. Our results show that OPU filaments can form given a broad range of boundary conditions for the magnetic field.