Spotting Ultrafine Loops in the Sun’s Corona
“A key to understanding the dynamics of the sun and what causes the great solar explosions there relies on deciphering how material, heat and energy swirl across the sun’s surface and rise into the upper atmosphere, or corona. Tracking the constantly moving material requires state-of-the-art telescopes with the highest resolution possible. By combining images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and a new generation telescope called the New Solar Telescope (NST) at Big Bear Solar Observatory in Big Bear City, Calif. scientists have for the first time observed a new facet of the system: especially narrow loops of solar material scattered on the sun’s surface, which are connected to higher lying, wider loops. These ultrafine loops, and their wider cousins may also help with the quest to determine how temperatures rise throughout the corona.
“We’re used to seeing magnetic loops on the sun,” says Philip Goode of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ, who was a co-author on a paper on these results in the Astrophysical Journal on May 1, 2012. “But we’ve never seen ones lying so low, that were so cold, or that were so narrow. These loops are 10 times narrower and at least 10 times cooler than the higher loops often seen by SDO.”
Goode and his colleagues, Wenda Cao and Haisheng Ji used the two telescopes to observe these loops in data from July 22, 2011. The combination of NST and SDO allowed the researchers to trace the flow of energy from the cooler ultrafine loops observed with NST to cospatial and cotemporal brightenings seen by SDO in the overlying million degree corona. In the NST observations, the loops show a nearly consistent width of what Goode says is a “surprisingly narrow diameter” of only about 60 miles across. The team aligned images from the NST, which can measure magnetic fields to high resolution, with the SDO images to find the magnetic footprint of these loops on the sun. The magnetic maps showed that the loops lined up with fine lanes on the sun that separate what’s known as granules – cells on the star’s surface that can be loosely understood as bubbles of boiling solar material that rise up from below. After the material, or plasma, rises up into the granules, it sweeps out to the sides, and flows back down these intergranular lanes. The lanes are consequently believed to contain concentrated magnetic fields, the perfect place for the origin of these newly spotted magnetic loops. The very position and shape of the ultrafine loops, therefore, help confirm models of the sun’s surface.”
“A key to understanding the dynamics of the sun and what causes the great solar explosions there relies on deciphering how material, heat and energy swirl across the sun’s surface and rise into the upper atmosphere, or corona. Tracking the constantly moving material requires state-of-the-art telescopes with the highest resolution possible. By combining images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and a new generation telescope called the New Solar Telescope (NST) at Big Bear Solar Observatory in Big Bear City, Calif. scientists have for the first time observed a new facet of the system: especially narrow loops of solar material scattered on the sun’s surface, which are connected to higher lying, wider loops. These ultrafine loops, and their wider cousins may also help with the quest to determine how temperatures rise throughout the corona.
“We’re used to seeing magnetic loops on the sun,” says Philip Goode of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ, who was a co-author on a paper on these results in the Astrophysical Journal on May 1, 2012. “But we’ve never seen ones lying so low, that were so cold, or that were so narrow. These loops are 10 times narrower and at least 10 times cooler than the higher loops often seen by SDO.”
Goode and his colleagues, Wenda Cao and Haisheng Ji used the two telescopes to observe these loops in data from July 22, 2011. The combination of NST and SDO allowed the researchers to trace the flow of energy from the cooler ultrafine loops observed with NST to cospatial and cotemporal brightenings seen by SDO in the overlying million degree corona. In the NST observations, the loops show a nearly consistent width of what Goode says is a “surprisingly narrow diameter” of only about 60 miles across. The team aligned images from the NST, which can measure magnetic fields to high resolution, with the SDO images to find the magnetic footprint of these loops on the sun. The magnetic maps showed that the loops lined up with fine lanes on the sun that separate what’s known as granules – cells on the star’s surface that can be loosely understood as bubbles of boiling solar material that rise up from below. After the material, or plasma, rises up into the granules, it sweeps out to the sides, and flows back down these intergranular lanes. The lanes are consequently believed to contain concentrated magnetic fields, the perfect place for the origin of these newly spotted magnetic loops. The very position and shape of the ultrafine loops, therefore, help confirm models of the sun’s surface.”
Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2012 | 7 notes
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