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Resolving the solar prominence/filament paradox using the magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability

Nature Astronomy volume 6, pages 942–950 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Prominences and filaments are manifestations of magnetized, levitated plasma within the solar coronal atmosphere. Their structure is assumed to be driven by the ambient magnetic field, but various open questions pertaining to their formation and evolution persist. In particular, the discrepancy between their appearance if projected against the solar disk or at the limb remain unexplained. State-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamic simulations yield a fully three-dimensional model that successfully unites the extreme ultraviolet and hydrogen Hα views of quiescent prominences that contain radial striations with the equivalent on-disk filaments comprised of finite width threads. We analyse all hydromagnetic sources of the vorticity evolution and find it consistent with the nonlinear development of the magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability. We show that this universal gravitational interchange process can explain the apparent dichotomy of the quiescent prominence/filament appearances. Our simulation could also be used to predict what the instruments associated with the Solar Orbiter and the Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will observe.

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Fig. 1: The formation of the coronal flux rope.
Fig. 2: Synthetic EUV and optical filament synthesis.
Fig. 3: Synthetic EUV and optical prominence synthesis.
Fig. 4: Vertically oriented fine structure within the rotated prominence projection.
Fig. 5: Comparison between simulation and observation.
Fig. 6: Decomposed baroclinitic contributions to the evolution of the ‘falling finger’.

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Data availability

All data processed within this manuscript are available online via Zenodo77.

Code availability

The open-source code for MPI-AMRVAC is available in the user files via Zenodo77 and also on the ERC Prominent website (https://erc-prominent.github.io). Visualizations were carried out within the yt-project framework (https://yt-project.org), using a modified form of the standard amrvac front-end available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the open-source software that made possible the data visualizations presented within this work: Python (https://www.python.org); the yt-project (https://yt-project.org) and matplotlib (https://matplotlib.org). We thank B. Popescu Braileanu, J.-B. Durrive and N. Claes for discussions that were instrumental to the scientific rigour of the study. R.K. and J.M.J. are supported by the ERC Advanced Grant PROMINENT and joint FWO-NSFC grant number G0E9619N. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 833251 PROMINENT ERC-ADG 2018). This research is further supported by Internal funds KU Leuven, project number C14/19/089 TRACESpace. The computational resources and services used in this work were provided by the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Flemish Government EWI department.

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  1. Centre for Mathematical Plasma-Astrophysics, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jack M. Jenkins & Rony Keppens

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  1. Jack M. Jenkins
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Contributions

J.M.J. completed the simulation and analysis. R.K. contributed to the model development and simulation evolution. J.M.J. and R.K. both contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jack M. Jenkins.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Andrew Hillier and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–9 and Discussion.

Supplementary Video 1

Filament, prominence, and field-aligned views of the formation and evolution of the simulation synthesized to appear equivalent to AIA 171 and hydrogen Hα observations.

Supplementary Video 2

A rotation around the simulation domain represented as a collection of semi-transparent, and correspondingly coloured, density isocontours.

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Jenkins, J.M., Keppens, R. Resolving the solar prominence/filament paradox using the magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Nat Astron 6, 942–950 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01705-z

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