DYNAMICS OF CORONAL RAIN AND DESCENDING PLASMA BLOBS IN SOLAR PROMINENCES. II. PARTIALLY IONIZED CASE

ABSTRACT Coronal rain clumps and prominence knots are dense condensations with chromospheric to transition region temperatures that fall down in the much hotter corona. Their typical speeds are in the range 30–150 km s −1 and of the order of 10–30 km s −1 , respectively, i.e., they are considerably smaller than free-fall velocities. These cold blobs contain a mixture of ionized and neutral material that must be dynamically coupled in order to fall together, as observed. We investigate this coupling by means of hydrodynamic simulations in which the coupling arises from the friction between ions and neutrals. The numerical simulations presented here are an extension of those of Oliver et al. to the partially ionized case. We find that, although the relative drift speed between the two species is smaller than 1 m s −1 at the blob center, it is sufficient to produce the forces required to strongly couple charged particles and neutrals. The ionization degree has no discernible effect on the main results of our previous work for a fully ionized plasma: the condensation has an initial acceleration phase followed by a period with roughly constant velocity, and, in addition, the maximum descending speed is clearly correlated with the ratio of initial blob to environment density.