Spectro-polarimetric Imaging Reveals Helical Magnetic Fields in Solar Prominence Feet

Abstract

Solar prominences are clouds of cool plasma levitating above the solar surface and insulated from the million-degree corona by magnetic fields. They form in regions of complex magnetic topology, characterized by non-potential fields, which can evolve abruptly, disintegrating the prominence and ejecting magnetized material into the heliosphere. However, their physics is not yet fully understood because mapping such complex magnetic configurations and their evolution is extremely challenging, and must often be guessed by proxy from photometric observations.Using state-of-the-art spectro-polarimetric data, we reconstruct the structure of the magnetic field in a prominence. We find that prominence feet harbor helical magnetic fields connecting the prominence to the solar surface below.

Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (2)

• Advanced Forward Modeling and Inversion of Stokes Profiles Resulting from the Joint Action of the Hanle and Zeeman Effects
• The magnetic field configuration of a solar prominence inferred from spectropolarimetric observations in the He I 10830 A triplet

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• Effects of spectral resolution on simple magnetic field diagnostics of the Mg II h & k lines
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• Ultraviolet Spectropolarimetry: Investigating stellar magnetic field diagnostics
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