Filaments (de-commissioned)

[Jesterface23]

The filaments are left to do all the work that the sunspots can't. 

No idea if the previous CME arrived or it was a SIR, but I'll try again lol. For this one I'll have a preliminary arrival time of /18 09:20Z, ~79.3 hours travel time, chance of error +-12 hours.

[hamateur 1953]

Slept through it agin!  The sun owes us a decent cme with some nice aurora!!   

[hamateur 1953]

If this is that cme it sure is hitting us now. solar wind speed is under 400 so maybe Europe will get a show!!   Naturally it is overcast where I live so expect a kp6-7 tonight! 🤣

10 hours ago, hamateur 1953 said:

Slept through it agin!  The sun owes us a decent cme with some nice aurora!!   

I’d give myself a broken heart cuz that’s how I feel about now!  Look. hopefully it’s clear in Scotland!! 

Edited February 16, 2023 by hamateur 1953

[Sam Warfel]

7 hours ago, hamateur 1953 said:

If this is that cme it sure is hitting us now. solar wind speed is under 400 so maybe Europe will get a show!!   Naturally it is overcast where I live so expect a kp6-7 tonight! 🤣

This is probably something else, it’s extremely early for that CME 

[Jesterface23]

Yeah, no CME, just a pretty classic CIR to CH HSS transition in progress from a CH facing us back on the 12th.

[hamateur 1953]

Yeah you both are probably correct, but watching the magnetometers last night, it sure looked like cme. No proton event that I saw anyway. 

[mozy]

Beautiful filament eruption near AR3229 triggering a M 3.7 flare.

Edited February 24, 2023 by mozy

[arjemma]

3 hours ago, mozy said:

Beautiful filament eruption near AR3229 triggering a M 3.7 flare.

Looks like it will hit STEREO by the first images that are out. We will have to wait on LASCO to see if we may hit. Looks promising.

Edited February 25, 2023 by arjemma
Typo

[Andrey M]

Hi! What can you say about this, with Kp7÷9 (!) at Feb 26? 

https://kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/CMEscoreboard/prediction/detail/2205

[Philalethes]

@Tormentius:

Looking at LASCO there does indeed seem to be a pretty large CME coming from that prominence eruption. However, it seems to be remarkably slow, or at least that's what it appears like to me. I think mozy was right about most of it falling back down, but it looked pretty huge, so it makes sense that a fair amount of material got launched.

It started being visible on C2 around ~12:30 and was clearly visible by 13:00, on C3 it started appearing around ~15:00 and was clearly visible by 16:00:

CACTUS clocked it at just a turtling ~200 km/s, and with an angle of ~120 degrees; looks right to me, but it's hard to determine that precisely:

I don't think there's much of an Earth-directed component, but given the width and location there could be.

Moving this discussion over here since it's about a prominence (filament) and not about any incoming region.

[NEAurora]

On 3/29/2023 at 10:10 PM, Philalethes Bythos said:

Moving this discussion over here since it's about a prominence (filament) and not about any incoming region.

Thanks for all of the follow up on this.  Looking at SDO, that filament is still there.  So now that it’s more Earth facing, what are the odds that this bad boy snaps and erupts again 😄?
 

I’m actually genuinely curious, is there anyway to actually make an educated guess at whether or not a filament will release? Or is it more or less just unforeseeable with the information we currently have?

[Philalethes]

2 hours ago, NEAurora said:

So now that it’s more Earth facing, what are the odds that this bad boy snaps and erupts again 😄?

I seem to have misplaced my crystal ball somewhere...let me try this magic 8-ball instead.

Oops. If you wait until I've had some afternoon tea I can try some tasseomancy instead.

I don't think there are a lot of widely used methods for predicting filament eruptions as of yet, but a quick search through the literature shows that some work has been done on it. In this study they looked into the matter and tried to develop an algorithm to predict eruptions, but only managed to do "slightly better than chance", and the best predictor they could find of whether a filament was about to erupt or not was a decrease in length; I'm not that clear on the physics involved, but from the filament eruptions I've seen it seems like one of the legs tends to disconnect and thus that the filament becomes a rope that is slung out, I assume this might be one of the reasons why length would appear to decrease. In this one the authors developed a model for using Hα lines to track the radial velocity (the "line-of-sight" velocity, i.e. directly towards the observer) of filaments, and found that they could identify (albeit over a small sample) if a filament was in the beginning stages of erupting as long as ~42 hours before launch (what they term "phase 1"), with clear confirmation occurring up to ~4 hours before launch ("phase 2"). In this one it seems like similar methodology is used, but using dopplergrams of the chromosphere in addition to better track the beginning stages of the filament movement. Marginally related is this one (by the same lead authors as the second study above), where they don't primarily try to predict whether or not filaments will erupt, but try to predict whether or not an erupting filament will result in a CME, finding that there's a certain threshold in the product of the radial velocity and the length of the filament, above which a filament eruption is likely to yield a CME and below which it's unlikely to do so.

These are all fairly "recent" studies (within ~5 years before present), so developing such findings into reliable and easily available tools for making predictions and detecting these filament movements in advance is seemingly still on the list of possible avenues of work to do.

[NEAurora]

@Philalethes Bythos many thanks for the detailed response, and some good recommendations for light reading for this weekend! 

[Philalethes]

As I was reading about some previous cycles an image caught my eye:

Apparently one of the largest prominences ever recorded, observed 19/12/1973. What a beast.

[Maurizio Marsigli]

7 hours ago, Philalethes Bythos said:

Mentre stavo leggendo di alcuni cicli precedenti, un'immagine ha attirato la mia attenzione:

Apparentemente una delle più grandi protuberanze mai registrate, osservata il 19/12/1973. Che bestia.

I saw it with the Lunt 50 ds. but less strong

[Jesterface23]

There was another filament eruption a little bit to the south-southwest that looks to be Earth directed. Certainly not as spectacular as the current CME.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Jesterface23

[Jesterface23]

The CME is may end up being slow enough that the center-disk CH HSS will end up degrading it, so not expecting another CME arrival currently.

[Philalethes]

1 hour ago, Jesterface23 said:

The CME is may end up being slow enough that the center-disk CH HSS will end up degrading it, so not expecting another CME arrival currently.

Doesn't look like there's much of a significant Earth-facing component to it anyway; looks like most of the blast was directed further south.

[Jesterface23]

8 minutes ago, Philalethes Bythos said:

Doesn't look like there's much of a significant Earth-facing component to it anyway; looks like most of the blast was directed further south.

Yeah, at least we are somewhere really close to the edge of the main bulk. There is a decent very faint full halo.

[Philalethes]

@NEAurora@Jesterface23

I'll post this here instead, probably the most appropriate spot for the time being.

I was just looking at SDO, and it looks like the second CME actually came from the visible disk; one of its "feet" appears to be rooted in the AR that just rotated into view (3289), but looks like a lot of it occurred where there is no AR at all. Seems like a filament eruption.

You can see it starting to erupt around ~02:00-03:00 or so, right before it's visible on C2 too:

Seems like this was associated with some of the smaller C-flares around that time.

Some possible Earth-directed component, perhaps?

Edited April 27, 2023 by Philalethes Bythos

[Jesterface23]

1 hour ago, Philalethes said:

I was just looking at SDO, and it looks like the second CME actually came from the visible disk; one of its "feet" appears to be rooted in the AR that just rotated into view (3289), but looks like a lot of it occurred where there is no AR at all. Seems like a filament eruption.

There are 2 different CMEs there. A bright larger CME over the limb directed northeastward and this bright smaller CME on our side of the disk directed eastward. It is easier to see in C2 imagery

[Philalethes]

19 minutes ago, Jesterface23 said:

There are 2 different CMEs there. A bright larger CME over the limb directed northeastward and this bright smaller CME on our side of the disk directed eastward. It is easier to see in C2 imagery

I agree that there are 2 different CMEs, but to me it definitely looks like this was the latter one; when the first smaller eruption becomes clearly visible on C2 at 01:25 the above eruption has not occurred at all, and that smaller one seems to be associated with a smaller flare occurring around that time in 3289.

The latter brighter one seems to coincide temporally with the eruption in the above gif, as the brunt of that eruption occurs around 02:00-03:00, with it becoming clearly visible on C2 at 02:36.

This leads me to suspect that it wasn't actually beyond the limb after all. I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like to me. Perhaps that second one over the limb you're talking about is a different one than the one I think.

Edited April 27, 2023 by Philalethes
clarification

[Jesterface23]

4 hours ago, Philalethes said:

I agree that there are 2 different CMEs, but to me it definitely looks like this was the latter one; when the first smaller eruption becomes clearly visible on C2 at 01:25 the above eruption has not occurred at all, and that smaller one seems to be associated with a smaller flare occurring around that time in 3289.

The latter brighter one seems to coincide temporally with the eruption in the above gif, as the brunt of that eruption occurs around 02:00-03:00, with it becoming clearly visible on C2 at 02:36.

This leads me to suspect that it wasn't actually beyond the limb after all. I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like to me. Perhaps that second one over the limb you're talking about is a different one than the one I think.

In the blue circle is where the filament that we see is. There are signs of something launching near the limb before that filament erupted, but I can't pinpoint exactly where it came from. It might be possible that the larger CME came from region 3289 or 3292, but I can't tell.

 

[Philalethes]

@Jhon Henry Osorio Orozco:

This filament eruption around 03:00-05:00 seems to be the closest match I can find to the halo seen on LASCO:

Not sure if I'm missing something here or not.

[Jesterface23]

51 minutes ago, Philalethes said:

Not sure if I'm missing something here or not.

Here ya go,