February 9th, 2018, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

February 9th, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Building a Magnetic Skeleton of the Solar Corona: Towards Better 3-D Constraints on the Coronal Magnetic Field

Anna Malanushenko (UCAR)

The energy stored in the solar magnetic field is what is powering many violent explosive events in the solar atmosphere, or the corona. Some of these events result in the coronal mass ejections (CME's) released into the interplanetary space. The magnetic field in the solar corona is therefore very important to know, yet it is very difficult to measure. Most of the time it is modeled with the magnetic maps at the solar surface used as boundary conditions. The magnetic maps on the surface are therefore also important to know, yet the full vector of the field on the surface is also difficult to measure. Once such measurements are made, constructing a model capable of predicting eruptive potential of a given region is on its own a complicated task. One of the problems arising is that that the equations for low-beta equilibria, which are often used to describe the coronal field, do not, strictly speaking, work for the solar surface. In short, we need better inputs to model the solar corona. The use of non-magnetic and non-surface constraints on the magnetic field becomes increasingly popular. For example, the paths of filaments can be used to guide flux rope trajectories; the loops of active regions, seen in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) can be used to obtain 3-D trajectories of magnetic field lines and estimate electric currents flowing along them. We are currently exploring ways to use other sources of data, such as flows in prominences and coronal spectropolarimetric data, in a similar fashion. I will talk about this work, and about our project of aggregating many different sources of non-magnetic 3-D constraints on the magnetic field. The resulting 'skeleton' can be used to constraint global field models, or to validate models obtained in traditional ways. We intend to develop a pipeline and assemble several skeletons for several instances in time of the Sun, which we will then release to community.