Coronal mass ejections acceleration problem

Abstract

A statistical study of acceleration and its error of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) is performed. A total of 5594 CMEs events have been analyzed by using a least-square method and using the error in the height measures. We verify that slower CMEs (velocities in the interval from 200 to 500 km s^-1) tend to have a positive acceleration (about 1 m s^-2) at heights above 5 solar radii, while less than 10% CMEs show an average negative acceleration (about -2.2 m s^-2) as they propagate from 5 to 30 solar radii. For most individual CMEs one can not say if they are accelerated or decelerated, only for 8% of all observed CMEs events one can extract the sign of the acceleration in the 5 30 solar radii.