3D MHD Modeling of an Observed Solar Prominence

Abstract

The physical mechanisms by which solar prominences (or filaments) form are still not well understood. The presently favored scenario invokes the evaporation of chromospheric plasma via localized heating at the footprints of a magnetic flux rope (MFR) or sheared arcade, and the subsequent condensation of this plasma in the corona due to thermal non-equilibrium (TNE). This scenario has been modeled extensively in one-dimensional (1D) hydrodynamic simulations along static magnetic field lines, and recently also in fully 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, using idealized MFR configurations. However, such configurations lack the complexity of real prominence magnetic fields. In this presentation, we first briefly discuss our prominence modeling approach for the case of an idealized 3D MFR configuration. We then report on our recent attempts to employ data-constrained MHD simulations to model the formation of observed filaments. To this end, we selected the filament that erupted in a spectacular manner on June 7, 2011 in NOAA AR 11226. To model its formation, we first develop a semi-realistic ("thermodynamic MHD") model of the solar corona, using SDO/HMI data as boundary condition for the magnetic field. Next, we insert an MFR constructed with the RBSL method (Titov et al., 2018) into the source region of the filament. Finally, we impose localized heating at the MFR's footprints. We compare our results with our idealized simulations and discuss the challenges that arise once realistic cases are considered.