Are They The same?

Remember that astronomy textbook which I have posted about in my earlier blog entry? I started skipping a few chapters ahead because I was curious about our Sun and wanted to learn more about this ball of nuclear reactor to better appreciate solar observations in the future.

I wanted to know more about solar prominences and solar filaments but there was no mention of the latter in the textbook. So, I decided to Wiki about it and found that they were actually the same thing. I thought they were mutually exclusive!

Let's start from how the Sun spins and generates its magnetic field. Earth has a nice North Pole and a South Pole, it too, generates a magnetic field that shields us from deadly solar radiation and whatnot. 

However, the Sun does not behave like that. This huge ball of gas spins at a different rate depending on its latitude. At the equator, it spins and completes a rotation at about 25 days, at mid-latitudes between the equator and the poles, it's about 30 days, and about 35 days at the poles. This is something called Differential Rotation and is common among gaseous bodies in Space, such as Jupiter, Saturn ect.

This differential rotation causes a lot of magnetic fields to form on the Sun. Unlike Earth's single North Pole and South Pole, the Sun has many of such poles. These magnetic fields disrupt the Sun's convection currents and thus the regions where they reside become relatively cooler than the surrounding plasma. That is how sunspots are formed.

Prominences are formed along the magnetic field lines where cooler gas with lesser pressure is "trapped" by surrounding hot gases with a higher pressure, bottling the cooler gas along the magnetic field line in the Sun's atmosphere called the Chromosphere, creating a solar prominence.

When this happens at the edge of the Sun, against the black background of Space, we see it as a beautiful prominence - a fiery arch that glows.

Beautiful solar prominence. 

When we are seeing it head-on, with the Sun's overly bright photosphere as a background, it becomes an elongated dark line on the chromosphere known as a filament.

Mysterious-looking solar filament.

They are the same thing. It only depends on where they appear on the Sun.

Please correct me if I am wrong. Thank you!