I would like to invite you to our session on magnetic fields in solar filaments at this years’ SHINE meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 11-15 2016.
http://shinecon.org/CurrentMeeting.php
We will discuss modern and future instrumentation and modeling of filaments, and their role in CME propagation and CME geoeffectiveness.
SHINE presents an opportunity for an open and frank discussion on important research topics. As such we do not have formal presentations. But if you would like to showcase how your research addresses this topic, send me an email with the details. We hope you can come along and provide input to this discussion on the magnetic nature of solar filaments, and play a role in all the SHINE sessions in Santa Fe.
The SHINE session will discuss the magnetic nature of solar filaments, focusing on two overarching science questions.
What is the magnetic field configuration of unstable solar filaments?
How does the magnetic field in erupting filaments manifest in disturbances at 1AU?
Given the impact of filament eruptions throughout the heliosphere, the objective of this session is to clarify where our understanding of filament magnetic structure and most importantly its destabilization, lies. We seek to engage experts in spectropolarimetry instrumentation, flux rope modeling, CME propagation observations, and Space Weather predictions in a discussion on solar filament magnetic fields. We seek to determine the future requirements in instrumentation and modeling that are necessary to replace ad-hoc (often missing) input of filament magnetic fields with near-realtime data. The interaction of the filament magnetic field (and that of the magnetic cloud) with the background solar wind plays a key role in predicting Bz at 1AU.
Solar filaments remain an enigma in the three important interconnected aspects of formation, structure, and stability. They form suddenly and quite spontaneously, sometimes in regions of preexisting magnetic flux and sometimes in regions of quiet Sun, but always over magnetic neutral lines. As they are cold dense chromospheric plasma surrounded by the hot, low density corona, their structure should both thermalize and collapse soon after formation. However they can be stable for several complete solar rotations. Conditions postulated to explain this stability, must simultaneously allow for the sudden and rapid removal of this stability as a large scale energy release in the form of a coronal mass ejection.
It is clear that magnetism plays a fundamental role in all three stages: it is the nature of magnetism to form linear, sheared structures that allows for their formation; the lack of cross- field drift in the structure shields the filament plasma from the rest of the corona; magnetism can suddenly rearrange its structure with a sudden loss of stability. However this magnetic field is currently only included as an ad-hoc input in our models (and is often ignored altogether). In this session we will address the key elements of what data we can currently input into models, how this could be implemented, and what future data may become available soon .
R.T.James McAteer, NMSU
Valentin Pillet, NSO