Counterstreaming in a Large Polar Crown Filament

Abstract

The motion of small-scale structures is well resolved in high-resolution filament images that were observed on 19 June 1998 with the Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope, La Palma. The filament was between 80 000 and 100 000 km high. The study is based on two hours of narrow-band observations at three wavelength positions in Hα. Velocities along the line of sight and in the transverse direction, respectively, V _los and V _tr, were measured for a large number of individual small-scale filament structures. Small features are all moving along nearly parallel threads, some in one direction along the threads and the remainder in the other direction, a pattern of motion known as counterstreaming. The net flow velocities in the two directions are about 8 km s⁻¹ and both are tilted by an angle δ≃16° relative to the plane of the sky. This angle is less than expected, by factors between 2.0 and 2.5, relative to the local horizontal plane. We believe that V _los is underestimated by these factors due to a line-shift reducing effect by the underlying Hα absorption line of the chromosphere.