MHD modelling of coronal streamers and their oscillations^⋆

¹ Centre for Mathematical Plasma Astrophysics (CmPA), Department of Mathematics, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200B, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: daria.sorokina@kuleuven.be
² SIDC – Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), Av. Circulaire 3, 1180 Brussels, Belgium
³ Institute of Physics, University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska, ul. Radziszewskiego 10, 20-031 Lublin, Poland

Received: 27 July 2023
Accepted: 9 November 2023

Abstract

Context. The present work investigates solar coronal dynamics in particular streamer waves. Streamer waves are transverse oscillations of the streamer stalk, often generated by the passage of a coronal mass ejection (CME). Recent observational studies infer that the streamer wave is an eigenmode of the streamer plasma slab and an excellent candidate for coronal seismology.

Aims. In the present work, we aim to numerically investigate the theoretical concepts of the physics and properties of streamer waves and to complement the observational statistical analysis of these events.

Methods. We used the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) module of MPI-AMRVAC. An adaptive mesh refinement scheme was employed to achieve high resolution for the streamer structure. All the simulations were computed on the same base grid with the same numerical methods. We considered a dipole magnetic field on the Sun and a uniformly accelerating solar wind. We introduced a θ-velocity perturbation within our computational domain in the plane of a streamer to excite the transverse motion.

Results. A numerical model for the streamer wave phenomena was constructed in the framework of 2.5D MHD. We performed a parameter study and identified a sensitivity of the streamer dynamics to the background solar wind speed, the characteristics of the perturbation, and the input parameters for the model, such as temperature and magnetic field. We performed a statistical analysis and compared the obtained modelling results with the database of such events from observations from three different coronagraphs. We observed a narrow range of phase speeds and a correlation between wavelength and period. This is consistent with the observations and supports the idea that the streamer wave is an eigenmode of the streamer plasma slab. The measured phase speed is consistently significantly higher than the speed calculated from the measured period and wavelength. The simple fit, when the difference between these two speeds is exactly the background solar wind speed, only matches a small fraction of the data. The obtained results indicate that further investigation is required into the Doppler shift effect in the MHD theory for coronal seismology.