MHD Waves in a Solar Prominence

Abstract

The presence of short- and long-period oscillations in quiescent solar prominences has been abundantly reported during recent years. In this paper, we use the Kippenhahn-Schlüter model to investigate the magneto-acoustic-gravity fast and slow modes of vibration of a prominence. First of all, we obtain analytically the MHD modes in the absence of gravity for a prominence with a purely horizontal magnetic field and, later, we solve the full problem numerically. Our results suggest that short-period horizontal oscillations detected in limb prominences could be due to the fundamental slow mode and its first harmonics, while the fast modes could produce vertical oscillations with periods around 3 minutes or periods ranging from 10 minutes to several hours, although the latter are suspicious to be unphysical.