No Arabic abstract
Multi-wavelength solar images in the EUV are routinely used for analysing solar features such as coronal holes, filaments, and flares. However, images taken in different bands often look remarkably similar as each band receives contributions coming from regions with a range of different temperatures. This has motivated the search for empirical techniques that may unmix these contributions and concentrate salient morphological features of the corona in a smaller set of less redundant source images. Blind Source Separation (BSS) precisely does this. Here we show how this novel concept also provides new insight into the physics of the solar corona, using observations made by SDO/AIA. The source images are extracted using a Bayesian positive source separation technique. We show how observations made in six spectral bands, corresponding to optically thin emissions, can be reconstructed by linear combination of three sources. These sources have a narrower temperature response and allow for considerable data reduction since the pertinent information from all six bands can be condensed in only one single composite picture. In addition, they give access to empirical temperature maps of the corona. The limitations of the BSS technique and some applications are briefly discussed.
Recently a blind source separation model was suggested for spatial data together with an estimator based on the simultaneous diagonalisation of two scatter matrices. The asymptotic properties of this estimator are derived here and a new estimator, based on the joint diagonalisation of more than two scatter matrices, is proposed. The asymptotic properties and merits of the novel estimator are verified in simulation studies. A real data example illustrates the method.
The quality of images of the Sun obtained from the ground are severely limited by the perturbing effect of the turbulent Earths atmosphere. The post-facto correction of the images to compensate for the presence of the atmosphere require the combination of high-order adaptive optics techniques, fast measurements to freeze the turbulent atmosphere and very time consuming blind deconvolution algorithms. Under mild seeing conditions, blind deconvolution algorithms can produce images of astonishing quality. They can be very competitive with those obtained from space, with the huge advantage of the flexibility of the instrumentation thanks to the direct access to the telescope. In this contribution we leverage deep learning techniques to significantly accelerate the blind deconvolution process and produce corrected images at a peak rate of ~100 images per second. We present two different architectures that produce excellent image corrections with noise suppression while maintaining the photometric properties of the images. As a consequence, polarimetric signals can be obtained with standard polarimetric modulation without any significant artifact. With the expected improvements in computer hardware and algorithms, we anticipate that on-site real-time correction of solar images will be possible in the near future.
Understanding the density structure of the solar corona is important for modeling both coronal heating and the solar wind. Direct measurements are difficult because of line-of-sight integration and possible unresolved structures. We present a new method for quantifying such structure using density-sensitive EUV line intensities to derive a density irregularity parameter, a relative measure of the amount of structure along the line of sight. We also present a simple model to relate the inferred irregularities to physical quantities, such as the filling factor and density contrast. For quiet Sun regions and interplume regions of coronal holes, we find a density contrast of at least a factor of three to ten and corresponding filling factors of about 10-20%. Our results are in rough agreement with other estimates of the density structures in these regions. The irregularity diagnostic provides a useful relative measure of unresolved structure in various regions of the corona.
We analyse the time series of solar irradiance measurements using chaos theory. The False Nearest Neighbour method (FNN), one of the most common methods of chaotic analysis is used for the analysis. One year data from the weather station located at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore with a temporal resolution of $1$ minute is employed for the study. The data is sampled at $60$ minutes interval and $30$ minutes interval for the analysis using the FNN method. Our experiments revealed that the optimum dimension required for solar irradiance is $4$ for both samplings. This indicates that a minimum of $4$ dimensions is required for embedding the data for the best representation of input. This study on obtaining the embedding dimension of solar irradiance measurement will greatly assist in fixing the number of previous data required for solar irradiance forecasting.
EUV (Extreme-Ultraviolet) waves are globally propagating disturbances that have been observed since the era of the SoHO/EIT instrument. Although the kinematics of the wave front and secondary wave components have been widely studied, there is not much known about the generation and plasma properties of the wave. In this paper we discuss the effect of an EUV wave on the local plasma as it passes through the corona. We studied the EUV wave, generated during the 2011 February 15 X-class flare/CME event, using Differential Emission Measure diagnostics. We analyzed regions on the path of the EUV wave and investigated the local density and temperature changes. From our study we have quantitatively confirmed previous results that during wave passage the plasma visible in the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) 171A channel is getting heated to higher temperatures corresponding to AIA 193A and 211A channels. We have calculated an increase of 6 - 9% in density and 5 - 6% in temperature during the passage of the EUV wave. We have compared the variation in temperature with the adiabatic relationship and have quantitatively demonstrated the phenomenon of heating due to adiabatic compression at the wave front. However, the cooling phase does not follow adiabatic relaxation but shows slow decay indicating slow energy release being triggered by the wave passage. We have also identified that heating is taking place at the front of the wave pulse rather than at the rear. Our results provide support for the case that the event under study here is a compressive fast-mode wave or a shock.