The Relationship between Chirality, Sense of Rotation, and Hemispheric Preference of Solar Eruptive Filaments

Abstract

Abstract The orientation, chirality, and dynamics of solar eruptive filaments are key to our understanding of the magnetic field of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and therefore to predicting the geoeffectiveness of CMEs arriving at Earth. However, confusion and contention remain over the relationship between the filament chirality, magnetic helicity, and the sense of rotation during eruption. To resolve the ambiguity in observations, in this paper we used stereoscopic observations to determine the rotation direction of filament apex and the method proposed by Chen et al. to determine the filament chirality. Our sample of 12 eruptive active-region filaments establishes a strong one-to-one relationship, i.e., during the eruption, sinistral/dextral filaments (located in the southern/northern hemisphere) rotate clockwise/counterclockwise when viewed from above, and corroborates a weak hemispheric preference, i.e., a filament and related sigmoid both exhibit a forward (reverse) S shape in the southern (northern) hemisphere, which suggests that the sigmoidal filament is associated with a low-lying magnetic flux rope with its axis dipped in the middle. As a result of rotation, the projected S shape of a filament is anticipated to be reversed during eruption.