Partial eruption of a filament with twisting nonuniform fields

TL;DR

This study investigates the partial eruption of a solar filament, revealing that a highly twisted flux rope became kink unstable due to expansion, with detailed magnetic field analysis supporting the kink instability mechanism.

Contribution

The paper provides new insights into the kink instability threshold for nonuniform, twisted magnetic flux ropes in solar filaments through combined observational and magnetic field extrapolation analysis.

Findings

A filament split and erupted in a kinklike fashion.

The flux rope was highly twisted and expanded with constant twist before eruption.

Kink instability likely triggered the partial eruption due to flux rope expansion.

Abstract

The eruption of the filament with the kink fashion is often regarded as a signature of the kink instability. However, the kink instability threshold for the filament magnetic structure has been not widely understood. Using the H-alpha observation from the New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST), we present a partial eruptive filament. In the eruption, a filament thread appeared to split from the middle portion of the filament and to break out in a kinklike fashion. During this period, the left filament material remained below, which erupted without the kinking motion later on. The coronal magnetic field lines associated with the filament are obtained from the nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) extrapolations using the 12 minutes cadence vector magnetograms of the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO). We studied the extrapolated field lines passing through the magnetic dips that are in good agreement with the observed filament. The field lines are non-uniformly twisted and appear to be made up by two twisted flux ropes winding about each other. One of them has higher twist than the other, and the highly twisted one has its dips aligned with the kinking eruptive thread at the beginning of its eruption. Before the eruption, moreover, the highly twisted flux rope was found to expand with the approximately constant field twist. In addition, the helicity flux maps deduced from the HMI magnetograms show that some helicity is injected into the overlying magnetic arcade, but no significant helicity is injected into the flux ropes. Accordingly, we suggest that the highly twisted flux rope became kink unstable when the instability threshold declined with the expansion of the flux rope.