Filament Chirality: A Link Between Fine-Scale and Global Patterns

Abstract

AbstractSolar features that exhibit chirality are: fibril patterns in filament channels, filaments, coronal arcades over filaments, superpenumbral fibrils exterior to sunspots, whole active regions observed with magnetographs, some large-scale X-ray structures, and interplanetary magnetic plasma clouds originating from coronal mass ejections. Their signatures of chirality are briefly reviewed; some details are mentioned to further show relationships which link all of the chirality patterns into a single framework. The helicity of solar magnetic fields is the evident physical phenomena which finks each of the seven features to each other and into a broader framework. The chirality system, viewed as a whole magnetic system, reveals: (1) a consistent rotational configuration of the dominant direction of the magnetic field with height of features within and over filament channels from the photosphere to the highest part of the solar corona, and (2) the prominence cavity as a unique space between magnetic fields of opposite helicity.