Internal Activities in a Solar Filament and Heating in Its Threads

Abstract

Filaments are one of the most common features in the solar atmosphere and are of significance in solar, stellar, and laboratory plasma physics. Using data from the Chinese Hα Solar Explorer, the Solar Upper Transition Region Imager, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory, we report on multiwavelength imaging and spectral observations of the activation of a small filament. The filament activation produces several localized dynamic brightenings, which are probably produced by internal reconnections of the braided magnetic fields in the filament. The filament expands during the activation, and its threads reconnect with the ambient magnetic fields, which leads to the formation of hot arcades or loops overlying the filament. The thermal energy of each of these localized brightenings is estimated in the order of 1025–1027 erg, and the total energy is estimated to be ∼1.77 × 1028 erg. Our observations demonstrate that the internal magnetic reconnections in the filament can lead to localized heating in the filament threads and prompt external reconnections with ambient corona structures and thus could contribute to the energy and mass transferring into the corona.