A Comparison Study of a Solar Active-Region Eruptive Filament and a Neighboring Non-Eruptive Filament

TL;DR

This study compares eruptive and non-eruptive filaments in a complex solar active region, revealing differences in magnetic structure, energy, and stability that influence eruption potential.

Contribution

It provides a detailed magnetic field analysis showing how magnetic flux ropes' size, energy, and stability determine filament eruption behavior.

Findings

Eruptive MFR is smaller but contains more free magnetic energy.

Eruptive MFR reaches the torus instability threshold, unlike the non-eruptive one.

Magnetic dips match observed filaments, supporting the MFR-dip model.

Abstract

Solar active region (AR) 11283 is a very magnetically complex region and it has produced many eruptions. However, there exists a non-eruptive filament in the plage region just next to an eruptive one in the AR, which gives us an opportunity to perform a comparison analysis of these two filaments. The coronal magnetic field extrapolated using a CESE-MHD-NLFFF code (Jiang & Feng 2013) reveals that two magnetic flux ropes (MFRs) exist in the same extrapolation box supporting these two filaments, respectively. Analysis of the magnetic field shows that the eruptive MFR contains a bald-patch separatrix surface (BPSS) co-spatial very well with a pre-eruptive EUV sigmoid, which is consistent with the BPSS model for coronal sigmoids. The magnetic dips of the non-eruptive MFRs match H{\alpha} observation of the non-eruptive filament strikingly well, which strongly supports the MFR-dip model for filaments. Compared with the non-eruptive MFR/filament (with a length of about 200 Mm), the eruptive MFR/filament is much smaller (with a length of about 20 Mm), but it contains most of the magnetic free energy in the extrapolation box and holds a much higher free energy density than the non-eruptive one. Both the MFRs are weakly twisted and cannot trigger kink instability. The AR eruptive MFR is unstable because its axis reaches above a critical height for torus instability, at which the overlying closed arcades can no longer confine the MFR stably. On the contrary, the quiescent MFR is very firmly held by its overlying field, as its axis apex is far below the torus-instability threshold height. Overall, this comparison investigation supports that MFR can exist prior to eruption and the ideal MHD instability can trigger MFR eruption.