Magnetic Dip Found in a Quiescent Prominence Foot via Observation and Simulation

Abstract Solar prominences (or filaments) are cooler and denser plasma suspended in the much hotter and rarefied solar corona. When viewed on the solar disk, filament barbs or feet protrude laterally from the filament spine. When observed at the limb of the Sun, they reach into the chromosphere or even further down. For a long time, the magnetic field orientation of barbs has remained a mystery due to the paradox that the barbs possess vertical fine structures and flows but are likely to be supported in a horizontal magnetic field. Here we present unambiguous observations of a magnetic dip in a quiescent prominence foot with an upward-curved field. That is indicated by the horizontal bidirectional outflows probably produced by magnetic reconnection between the fields of a tiny erupting filament and those in a prominence foot. The altitude at the bottom of the dip is ∼30 Mm. At the edge of the prominence foot, the angle between the dip field and the local horizontal is ∼4°. Additionally, the curvature radius of the dip bottom is estimated to be around 73 Mm. We also conduct magnetofrictional simulation to self-consistently form a large-scale magnetic flux rope with magnetic dips resembling the spine and feet of the quiescent prominence. The observations shed light on the field structure of prominences, which is crucial for the instability that accounts for the eruption of prominences and coronal mass ejections.