Quiescent and Eruptive Prominences at Solar Minimum: A Statistical Study via an Automated Tracking System

Abstract

We employ an automated detection algorithm to perform a global study of solar prominence characteristics. We process four months of TESIS observations in the He II 304 A line taken close to the solar minimum of 2008-2009 and focus mainly on quiescent and quiescent-eruptive prominences. We detect a total of 389 individual features ranging from 25x25 to 150x500 Mm in size and obtain distributions of many their spatial characteristics, such as latitudinal position, height, size and shape. To study their dynamics, we classify prominences as either stable or eruptive and calculate their average centroid velocities, which are found to be rarely exceeding 3 km/s. Besides, we give rough estimates of mass and gravitational energy for every detected prominence and use these values to evaluate the total mass and gravitational energy of all simultaneously existing prominences (10e12-10e14 kg and 10e29-10e31 erg, respectively). Finally, we investigate the form of the gravitational energy spectrum of prominences and derive it to be a power-law of index -1.1 +- 0.2.