The magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability is a fundamental instability
of many astrophysical systems and recent observations are consistent
with this instability developing in solar prominences. Prominences are cool,
dense clouds of plasma that form in the solar corona that display a wide range
of dynamics of a multitude of spatial ...
The magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability is a fundamental instability
of many astrophysical systems and recent observations are consistent
with this instability developing in solar prominences. Prominences are cool,
dense clouds of plasma that form in the solar corona that display a wide range
of dynamics of a multitude of spatial and temporal scales, and two different
phenomena that have been discovered to occur in prominences can be understood
as resulting from the Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The first is that of
plumes that rise through quiescent prominences from low density bubbles that
form below them. The second is that of a prominence eruption that fragments
as the material falls back to the solar surface. To identify these events as the
magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability, a wide range of theoretical work, both
numerical and analytical, has been performed, though alternative explanations
do exist. For both of these sets of observations, determining that they are created
by the magnetic Rayleigh–Taylor instability has meant that the linear
instability conditions and nonlinear dynamics can be used to make estimates
of the magnetic field strength. There are strong connections between these
phenomena and those in a number of other astro, space and plasma systems,
making these observations very important for our understanding of the role of
the Rayleigh–Taylor instability in magnetised systems.