Prominence Formation and Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding prominence formation, oscillations, and eruptions in the solar atmosphere, combining data analysis with radiative MHD simulations to reveal new insights into their dynamics and potential eruption precursors.

Contribution

The paper presents updated radiative cooling effects, a new scaling law for prominence thread length, and proposes prominence oscillations as eruption precursors, advancing the understanding of prominence behavior.

Findings

Coronal condensation occurs faster with updated cooling functions.

Seed condensations can grow via siphon flows even after evaporation stops.

Long-time out-of-phase oscillations may indicate imminent eruptions.

Abstract

Prominences, or filaments, are a striking phenomenon in the solar atmosphere. Besides their own rich features and dynamics, they are related to many other activities, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In the past several years we have been investigating the prominence formation, oscillations, and eruptions through both data analysis and radiative hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. This paper reviews our progress on these topics, which includes: (1) With updated radiative cooling function, the coronal condensation becomes a little faster than previous work; (2) Once a seed condensation is formed, it can grow via siphon flow spontaneously even if the evaporation stops; (3) A scaling law was obtained to relate the length of the prominence thread to various parameters, indicating that higher prominences tend to have shorter threads, which is consistent with the fact that threads are long in active region prominences and short in quiescent prominences; (4) It was proposed that long-time prominence oscillations out of phase might serve as a precursor for prominence eruptions and CMEs; (5) An ensemble of oscillating prominence threads may explain the counter-streaming motion.