The Effects of Partial Ionization on Prominence Mass Formation

Abstract:

The origin of the prominence mass has been an open question since this cool plasma suspended in the hot corona was first discovered. We have known for a long time that the mass must come from the chromosphere, but it is unclear whether this mass is lifted bodily through magnetic levitation, injected by reconnection-driven upflows, or driven from the chromosphere by evaporation and then condensed. One evaporation-condensation scenario, the thermal nonequilibrium (TNE) model, is the most fully developed, quantitative model for the prominence plasma to date. In the TNE scenario, localized heating concentrated at the coronal loop footpoints produces chromospheric evaporation, filling the flux tube with hot, dense plasma that subsequently collapses radiatively to form cool condensations. Thus far this model has been successful in explaining the key properties of the long, persistent threads and small, highly dynamic, transient blobs in prominences, the damping of large-amplitude field-aligned prominence oscillations, the appearance of horn-shaped features above the cool prominence in EUV images of coronal cavities, and coronal rain in the ambient corona. To date, all studies of TNE have assumed that the plasma is fully ionized, which is appropriate for the hot coronal gas but unrealistic for the cool plasma below ~30,000 K. The energetics, dynamics, and evolutionary time scales of the TNE process are expected to be altered when the effects of ionization and recombination are considered. We have modified ARGOS, our 1D hydrodynamic code with adaptive mesh refinement, to include an equation of state that accounts for the effects of partial ionization of the plasma over a wide range of temperatures and densities. We will discuss the results of these simulations and their comparison with our previous studies of TNE in typical filament-supporting flux tubes.

This work was partially supported by NASA’s LWS Strategic Capability program.