The Relationship between Chirality, Sense of Rotation, and Hemispheric Preference of Solar Eruptive Filaments

Abstract

The orientation, chirality, and dynamics of solar eruptive filaments is a key to understanding the magnetic field of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and therefore to predicting the geoeffectiveness of CMEs arriving at Earth. However, confusion and contention remain over the relationship between the filament chirality, magnetic helicity, and sense of rotation during eruption. To resolve the ambiguity in observations, in this paper, we used stereoscopic observations to determine the rotation direction of filament apex and the method proposed by Chen et al. (2014) to determine the filament chirality. Our sample of 12 eruptive active-region filaments establishes a strong one-to-one relationship, i.e., during the eruption, sinistral/dextral filaments (located in the southern/northern hemisphere) rotate clockwise/counterclockwise when viewed from above, and corroborates a weak hemispheric preference, i.e., a filament and related sigmoid both exhibit a forward (reverse) S shape in the southern (northern) hemisphere, which suggests that the sigmoidal filament is associated with a low-lying magnetic flux rope with its axis dipped in the middle. As a result of rotation, the projected S shape of a filament is anticipated to be reversed during eruption.

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• Magnetic Flux Ropes in the Solar Corona: Structure and Evolution toward Eruption
• Some interesting topics provoked by the solar filament research in the past decade
• The Rotation of Magnetic Flux Rope Formed during Solar Eruption
• Pre-eruption Splitting of the Double-Decker Structure in a Solar Filament
• Investigation on the Spatiotemporal Structures of Supra-Arcade Spikes
• An Atypical Plateau-like Extreme-ultraviolet Late-phase Solar Flare Driven by the Non-radial Eruption of a Magnetic Flux Rope
• Quantification of the Writhe Number Evolution of Solar Filament Axes