No Arabic abstract
Solar activity plays a quintessential role in influencing the interplanetary medium and space-weather around the Earth. Remote sensing instruments onboard heliophysics space missions provide a pool of information about the Suns activity via the measurement of its magnetic field and the emission of light from the multi-layered, multi-thermal, and dynamic solar atmosphere. Extreme UV (EUV) wavelength observations from space help in understanding the subtleties of the outer layers of the Sun, namely the chromosphere and the corona. Unfortunately, such instruments, like the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), suffer from time-dependent degradation, reducing their sensitivity. Current state-of-the-art calibration techniques rely on periodic sounding rockets, which can be infrequent and rather unfeasible for deep-space missions. We present an alternative calibration approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We use SDO-AIA data for our analysis. Our results show that CNN-based models could comprehensively reproduce the sounding rocket experiments outcomes within a reasonable degree of accuracy, indicating that it performs equally well compared with the current techniques. Furthermore, a comparison with a standard astronomers technique baseline model reveals that the CNN approach significantly outperforms this baseline. Our approach establishes the framework for a novel technique to calibrate EUV instruments and advance our understanding of the cross-channel relation between different EUV channels.
As a part of NASAs Heliophysics System Observatory (HSO) fleet of satellites,the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has continuously monitored the Sun since2010. Ultraviolet (UV) and Extreme UV (EUV) instruments in orbit, such asSDOs Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument, suffer time-dependent degradation which reduces instrument sensitivity. Accurate calibration for (E)UV instruments currently depends on periodic sounding rockets, which are infrequent and not practical for heliophysics missions in deep space. In the present work, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that auto-calibrates SDO/AIA channels and corrects sensitivity degradation by exploiting spatial patterns in multi-wavelength observations to arrive at a self-calibration of (E)UV imaging instruments. Our results remove a major impediment to developing future HSOmissions of the same scientific caliber as SDO but in deep space, able to observe the Sun from more vantage points than just SDOs current geosynchronous orbit.This approach can be adopted to perform autocalibration of other imaging systems exhibiting similar forms of degradation
We introduce a new machine learning based technique to detect exoplanets using the transit method. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have proven to be broadly applicable in various scientific research areas. We aim to exploit some of these methods to improve the conventional algorithm based approaches presently used in astrophysics to detect exoplanets. Using the time-series analysis library TSFresh to analyse light curves, we extracted 789 features from each curve, which capture the information about the characteristics of a light curve. We then used these features to train a gradient boosting classifier using the machine learning tool lightgbm. This approach was tested on simulated data, which showed that is more effective than the conventional box least squares fitting (BLS) method. We further found that our method produced comparable results to existing state-of-the-art deep learning models, while being much more computationally efficient and without needing folded and secondary views of the light curves. For Kepler data, the method is able to predict a planet with an AUC of 0.948, so that 94.8 per cent of the true planet signals are ranked higher than non-planet signals. The resulting recall is 0.96, so that 96 per cent of real planets are classified as planets. For the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data, we found our method can classify light curves with an accuracy of 0.98, and is able to identify planets with a recall of 0.82 at a precision of 0.63.
Theoretical stellar spectra rely on model stellar atmospheres computed based on our understanding of the physical laws at play in the stellar interiors. These models, coupled with atomic and molecular line databases, are used to generate theoretical stellar spectral libraries (SSLs) comprising of stellar spectra over a regular grid of atmospheric parameters (temperature, surface gravity, abundances) at any desired resolution. Another class of SSLs is referred to as empirical spectral libraries; these contain observed spectra at limited resolution. SSLs play an essential role in deriving the properties of stars and stellar populations. Both theoretical and empirical libraries suffer from limited coverage over the parameter space. This limitation is overcome to some extent by generating spectra for specific sets of atmospheric parameters by interpolating within the grid of available parameter space. In this work, we present a method for spectral interpolation in the optical region using machine learning algorithms that are generic, easily adaptable for any SSL without much change in the model parameters, and computationally inexpensive. We use two machine learning techniques, Random Forest (RF) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and train the models on the MILES library. We apply the trained models to spectra from the CFLIB for testing and show that the performance of the two models is comparable. We show that both the models achieve better accuracy than the existing methods of polynomial based interpolation and the Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) interpolation.
The perplexing mystery of what maintains the solar coronal temperature at about a million K, while the visible disc of the Sun is only at 5800 K, has been a long standing problem in solar physics. A recent study by Mondal(2020) has provided the first evidence for the presence of numerous ubiquitous impulsive emissions at low radio frequencies from the quiet sun regions, which could hold the key to solving this mystery. These features occur at rates of about five hundred events per minute, and their strength is only a few percent of the background steady emission. One of the next steps for exploring the feasibility of this resolution to the coronal heating problem is to understand the morphology of these emissions. To meet this objective we have developed a technique based on an unsupervised machine learning approach for characterising the morphology of these impulsive emissions. Here we present the results of application of this technique to over 8000 images spanning 70 minutes of data in which about 34,500 features could robustly be characterised as 2D elliptical Gaussians.