No Arabic abstract
Context. The solar chromosphere is the interface between the solar surface and the solar corona. Modelling of this region is difficult because it represents the transition from optically thick to thin radiation escape, from gas-pressure domination to magnetic-pressure domination, from a neutral to an ionised state, from MHD to plasma physics, and from near-equilibrium (LTE) to non-equilibrium conditions. Aims. Our aim is to provide the community with realistic simulations of the magnetic solar outer atmosphere. This will enable detailed comparison of existing and upcoming observations with synthetic observables from the simulations, thereby elucidating the complex interactions of magnetic fields and plasma that are crucial for our understanding of the dynamic outer atmosphere. Methods. We used the radiation magnetohydrodynamics code Bifrost to perform simulations of a computational volume with a magnetic field topology similar to an enhanced network area on the Sun. Results. The full simulation cubes are made available online. The general properties of the simulation are discussed, and limitations are discussed.
I highlight several concerns regarding the consistency of Type Ia supernova data in the publicly available Pantheon and JLA compilations. The measured heliocentric redshifts (zhel) of $sim$150 SNe Ia as reported in the Pantheon catalogue are significantly discrepant from those in JLA - with 58 having differences amounting to between 5 and 137 times the quoted measurement uncertainty. The discrepancy seems to have been introduced in the process of rectifying a previously reported issue. The Pantheon catalogue until very recently had the redshifts of all SNe Ia up to z $sim$ 0.3 modified under the guise of peculiar velocity corrections - although there is no information on peculiar velocities at such high redshifts. While this has reportedly been rectified on Github by removing peculiar velocity corrections for z > 0.08, the impact of this on the published cosmological analysis of the Pantheon catalogue is not stated. In JLA, the effect of these corrections is to significantly bias the inferred value of $Omega_{Lambda}$ towards higher values, while the equivalent effect on Pantheon cannot be ascertained due to the unavailability of the individual components of the covariance matrix in the public domain. I provide Jupyter notebooks and URLs in order to allow the reader to ascertain the veracity of these assertions.
We present a simple, physically-motivated model to interpret consistently the emission from galaxies at ultraviolet, optical and infrared wavelengths. We combine this model with a Bayesian method to obtain robust statistical constraints on key parameters describing the stellar content, star formation activity and dust content of galaxies. Our model is now publicly available via a user-friendly code package, MAGPHYS at www.iap.fr/magphys. We present an application of this model to interpret a sample of ~1400 local (z<0.5) galaxies from the H-ATLAS survey. We find that, for these galaxies, the diffuse interstellar medium, powered mainly by stars older than 10 Myr, accounts for about half the total infrared luminosity. We discuss the implications of this result to the use of star formation rate indicators based on total infrared luminosity.
Large-scale annotation of image segmentation datasets is often prohibitively expensive, as it usually requires a huge number of worker hours to obtain high-quality results. Abundant and reliable data has been, however, crucial for the advances on image understanding tasks achieved by deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce FreeLabel, an intuitive open-source web interface that allows users to obtain high-quality segmentation masks with just a few freehand scribbles, in a matter of seconds. The efficacy of FreeLabel is quantitatively demonstrated by experimental results on the PASCAL dataset as well as on a dataset from the agricultural domain. Designed to benefit the computer vision community, FreeLabel can be used for both crowdsourced or private annotation and has a modular structure that can be easily adapted for any image dataset.
Observations of the polar region of the Sun are critically important for understanding the solar dynamo and the acceleration of solar wind. We carried out precise magnetic observations on both the North polar region and the quiet Sun at the East limb with the Spectro-Polarimeter of the Solar Optical Telescope aboard Hinode to characterize the polar region with respect to the quiet Sun. The average area and the total magnetic flux of the kG magnetic concentrations in the polar region appear to be larger than those of the quiet Sun. The magnetic field vectors classified as vertical in the quiet Sun have symmetric histograms around zero in the strengths, showing balanced positive and negative flux, while the histogram in the North polar region is clearly asymmetric, showing a predominance of the negative polarity. The total magnetic flux of the polar region is larger than that of the quiet Sun. In contrast, the histogram of the horizontal magnetic fields is exactly the same between the polar region and the quiet Sun. This is consistent with the idea that a local dynamo process is responsible for the horizontal magnetic fields. A high-resolution potential field extrapolation shows that the majority of magnetic field lines from the kG-patches in the polar region are open with a fanning-out structure very low in the atmosphere, while in the quiet Sun, almost all the field lines are closed.
We studied the dynamics of the solar atmosphere in the region of a large quiet-Sun filament, which erupted on 21 October 2010. The filament eruption started at its northern end and disappeared from the H$alpha$ line-core filtergrams line within a few hours. The very fast motions of the northern leg were recorded in ultraviolet light by AIA. We aim to study a wide range of available datasets describing the dynamics of the solar atmosphere for five days around the filament eruption. This interval covers three days of the filament evolution, one day before the filament growth and one day after the eruption. We search for possible triggers that lead to the eruption of the filament. The surface velocity field in the region of the filament were measured by means of time-distance helioseismology and coherent structure tracking. The apparent velocities in the higher atmosphere were estimated by tracking the features in the 30.4 nm AIA observations. To capture the evolution of the magnetic field, we extrapolated the photospheric line-of-sight magnetograms and also computed the decay index of the magnetic field. We found that photospheric velocity fields showed some peculiarities. Before the filament activation, we observed a temporal increase of the converging flows towards the filaments spine. In addition, the mean squared velocity increased temporarily before the activation and peaked just before it, followed by a steep decrease. We further see an increase in the average shear of the zonal flow component in the filaments region, followed by a steep decrease. The photospheric l.o.s. magnetic field shows a persistent increase of induction eastward from the filament spine. The decay index of the magnetic field at heights around 10 Mm shows a value larger than critical at the connecting point of the northern filament end.