EXPLORING THE PROMINENCE-CORONA CONNECTION AND ITS EXPANSION INTO THE OUTER CORONA USING TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OBSERVATIONS

Prominences constitute the most complex magnetic structures in the solar corona. The ubiquitous presence of their seemingly confined dense and cool plasma in an otherwise million-degree environment remains a puzzle. Using a decade of white light total solar eclipse observations, we show how these images reveal an intricate relationship between prominences and coronal structures both in their immediate vicinity, known as coronal cavities, and in the extended corona out to several solar radii. Observations of suspended prominences and twisted helical structures spanning several solar radii are central to these findings. The different manifestations of the prominence–corona interface that emerge from this study underscore the fundamental role played by prominences in defining and controlling the complex expansion and dynamic behavior of the solar magnetic field in the neighborhood of magnetic polarity reversal regions. This study suggests that the unraveling of prominences and the outward expansion of the helical twisted field lines linked to them could be the solar origin of twisted magnetic flux ropes detected in interplanetary space, and of the mechanism by which the Sun sheds its magnetic helicity. This work also underscores the likely role of the prominence–corona interface as a source of the slow solar wind.