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Sangwoo Lee, H. S. Yun, Jung-Hoon Kim (SNU), J. Chae, P. R. Goode (BBSO), G. S. Choe (PPPL)
It has been a long-standing mystery in the study of the Sun how cool and dense plasma material in prominences can be supported against gravity. A common wisdom has been to assume magnetic field configurations with magnetic dips which supply an upward magnetic tension. A number of proposed theoretical models have regarded magnetic dips as a supporting mechanism of the dense plasma material. Nevertheless, the existence of magnetic dips in prominences has a scant observational underpinning mainly because of the difficulty in determining 3-D magnetic fields in prominences. For the first time, we report observational evidence for magnetic dips based on the mass motion seen in prominences. We have found an oscillatory overshooting out of a prominence body, which is very naturally explained as mass motion along dipped magnetic field lines sagging under gravity.