Gas Motions around Filament

While studying the problem on energy releases in solar flares, I am also interested in energy accumulation processes in these explosive phenomena. Since we can often observe explosive events associated with filaments, the study of filament activities could tell us how the energy for explosion is accumulated and stored. This is why we investigated gas motions around a filament. (The side reason is that I had a nice chance to touch a lot of useful data of filaments since I got a job at Hida observatory!) We think that patterns of gas motions are a key factor to know energy accumulation processes so that we derived several photospheric velocity fields by means of Local Correlation Technique (LCT) from G-band image data (Figure 4). We found shearing or converging motions arouond a filament. These motions probably have a close relationship to energy build-up processes in a magnetic arcade overlying the filament (Magara & Kitai 1999).


References

Magara, T., & Kitai, R. 1999, ApJ, 524, 469