INTERRUPTED ERUPTION OF LARGE QUIESCENT FILAMENT ASSOCIATED WITH A HALO CME

We analyze the observations of an eruptive quiescent filament associated with a halo Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). We use observations from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)/Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO A/B) satellites. The filament exhibits a slow-rise phase followed by a gradual acceleration and then completely disappears. The filament could be traced in STEREO observations up to an altitude of about 1.44 R ⊙ , where its rise speed reached ∼14 km s−1 and disappeared completely at about 10:32 UT on 2011 October 21. The CME associated with the filament eruption and two bright ribbons in the chromosphere both appeared at about 01:30 UT on October 22, i.e., 15 hr after the filament eruption was seen in He ii 304 Å filtergrams. We show that this delay is abnormally large even if the slow rise speed and slow acceleration of the filament are taken into account. To understand the cause of this delay, we compute the decay index (n) of the overlying coronal magnetic field. The height distribution of the decay index, n, suggests that the zone of instability ( n > 1) at a lower altitude, 144–480 Mm, is followed by a zone of stability ( n < 1) between 540 and 660 Mm. We interpret the observed delay to be due to the presence of the latter zone, i.e., the zone of stability, which could provide a second quasi-equilibrium state to the filament until it finally erupts.