Investigating the driving mechanisms of coronal mass ejections

TL;DR

This study analyzes the kinematics of two coronal mass ejections and compares observations with theoretical models to identify their driving mechanisms, finding that different CMEs align with different models such as breakout and hybrid models.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of CME kinematics with multiple theoretical models to determine their driving mechanisms.

Findings

CME06 aligns with a hybrid of catastrophe and breakout models.

CME07 is best explained by the breakout model.

Both CMEs showed acceleration drops before increasing again.

Abstract

The objective of this investigation was to first examine the kinematics of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) using EUV and coronagraph images, and then to make a comparison with theoretical models in the hope to identify the driving mechanisms of the CMEs. We have studied two CMEs which occurred on 2006 Dec. 17 (CME06) and 2007 Dec. 31 (CME07). The models studied in this work were catastrophe, breakout, and toroidal instability models. We found that after the eruption, the accelerations of both events exhibited a drop before increasing again. Our comparisons with the theories suggested that CME06 can be best described by a hybrid of the catastrophe and breakout models while CME07 is most consistent with the breakout model.