THE SOURCE REGIONS OF SOLAR CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS

Knowledge of the origin of the solar coronal mass ejection (CME) may be crucial to our understanding of several active solar phenomena, such as flares, as well as to the structure and stability of the corona and the prediction of interplanetary disturbances. In recent years, two camps of opinion have emerged, based on the belief that CMEs either commonly originate from structures intimately linked to active regions or they originate from coronal hole regions. This present study investigates the locations of 95 CME events observed during 1984-1986 relative to coronal hole and active region features. We find no evidence to support the coronal hole hypothesis and many indications that active regions are indeed associated with the source regions of CMEs. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.