Prominence plasma diagnostics through EUV absorption

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel EUV and UV absorption diagnostic method to determine prominence plasma properties, especially effective for hot, erupting prominences during early CME phases, using existing space mission data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new prominence plasma diagnostic technique based on EUV and UV absorption, applicable to existing solar observation data, and capable of estimating multiple plasma parameters.

Findings

Effective for prominences hotter than 15,000 K

Can determine electron temperature, column emission measure, and He/H abundance

Applicable to data from various space missions

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new diagnostic technique that uses prominence EUV and UV absorption to determine the prominence plasma electron temperature and column emission measure, as well as He/H relative abundance; if a realistic assumption on the geometry of the absorbing plasma can be made, this technique can also yield the absorbing plasma electron density. This technique capitalizes on the absorption properties of Hydrogen and Helium at different wavelength ranges and temperature regimes. Several cases where this technique can be successfully applied are described. This technique works best when prominence plasmas are hotter than 15,000 K and thus it is ideally suited for rapidly heating erupting prominences observed during the initial phases of coronal mass ejections. An example is made using simulated intensities of 4 channels of the SDO/AIA instrument. This technique can be easily applied to existing observations from almost all space missions devoted to the study of the solar atmosphere, which we list.