Small-scale Turbulent Motion of the Plasma in a Solar Filament as the Precursor of Eruption

TL;DR

This study shows that increased small-scale turbulent motions within a solar filament and nearby coronal emissions can serve as early indicators of an imminent eruption, providing valuable insights for space weather prediction.

Contribution

It demonstrates that micro-turbulence and coronal emission increases precede filament eruptions, even when global magnetic field configurations remain unchanged.

Findings

Micro-turbulence inside the filament increased 6 hours before eruption.

Nearby coronal line emission increased 10 hours prior to eruption.

Global magnetic field configuration showed no significant change before eruption.

Abstract

A filament, a dense cool plasma supported by the magnetic fields in the solar corona, often becomes unstable and erupts. It is empirically known that the filament often demonstrates some activations such as a turbulent motion prior to eruption. In our previous study (Seki et al. 2017), we analysed the Doppler velocity of an H{\alpha} filament and found that the standard deviation of the line-of-sight-velocity (LOSV) distribution in a filament, which indicates the increasing amplitude of the small-scale motions, increased prior to the onset of the eruption. Here, we present a further analysis on this filament eruption, which initiated approximately at 03:40UT on 2016 November 5 in the vicinity of NOAA AR 12605. It includes a coronal line observation and the extrapolation of the surrounding magnetic fields. We found that both the spatially averaged micro-turbulence inside the filament and the nearby coronal line emission increased 6 and 10 hours prior to eruption, respectively. In this event, we did not find any significant changes in the global potential-field configuration preceding the eruption for the past 2 days, which indicates that there is a case in which it is difficult to predict the eruption only by tracking the extrapolated global magnetic fields. In terms of space weather prediction, our result on the turbulent motions in a filament could be used as the useful precursor of a filament eruption.