Gallery

This gallery shows a selection of data plots, images and animations produced by the SWATNet Early Stage Researchers.

Solar flux ropes

Magnetic flux ropes are key ingredients of coronal mass ejections – the main drivers of big space weather storms. Modelling of them is therefore in the centre of solar terrestrial studies, but finding them from coronal simulations is not an easy task. This animation shows a rising solar flux rope extracted from a data-driven lower coronal magnetofrictional simulation using a developed semi-automated identification algorithm for an eruption that occurred from active region 12473 on 28 December 2015. Flux ropes are structures where magnetic field lines wind about a common axis, in other words they have a high magnetic twist. The bottom of the simulation domain shows the evolving boundary condition that is the time series of solar surface magnetic fields taken by Solar Dynamics Observatory. (Andreas Wagner/Project 6)

Solar Energetic particles

Coronal and interplanetary shocks driven by solar eruptions are efficient accelerators of charged particles. These particles can be of significant threat to satellites and humans in space. This animation shows temporal evolution of particles with magnetic focusing on a parallel shock propagating outwards from the Sun along an exponentially decreasing magnetic field. The focusing by inhomogeneous magnetic fields can be an important contributor to shock acceleration process. (Lidiya Annie John/Project 6)

Features on the Sun

The most powerful solar flares come from complex sunspots called delta-sunspots. For a better understanding of their underlying physics an automated mathematical morphology detection method was developed that allows extensive statistical studies. The plot on left shows Solar Dynamics Observatory’s ultraviolet image on 1 January 2014. The identified sunspots are marked red in the plot. The figure on right shows the corresponding magnetogram with sunspot contours superimposed revealing their magnetic polarity. Inward directed magnetic fields are red and outward directed fields are turquoise. The red bounding boxes encompass sunspots with different magnetic polarities. (Slava Bourgeois/Project 12)
Catching brightenings in our Sun is important for investigated the dynamics and configurations of the lower solar atmosphere. The background in the left figure shows the solar active region 11226 imaged at 1600 Ångström wavelength. This wavelength reveals the lower atmosphere of the Sun. The red pixels mark transient brightenings over one day period. The right figure shows the line-of-sight magnetic field at the solar surface for the same area. The black contours correspond to brightenings and the white contours the area where the direction of the magnetic field changes. (Augustin André-Hoffmann/Project 2)

Modelling of the solar atmosphere

Why is the solar corona in millions of degrees of temperature? This question remains to puzzle the science community. These red and blue zebra-stripes show temperature perturbations in a lower coronal simulation. The left figure shows a simulation result where no waves are launched in the simulation. In this case temperature perturbations are very small. The right panel shows the result when coupled magneto-acoustic and Alfvén waves are introduced in the simulation. Now temperature perturbations are much larger. This demonstrates that the investigated waves can result in heating of the chromosphere, the atmospheric layer below the corona. (Mayank Kumar/Project 5)
The modelling of the solar magnetic field is a key for our understanding of the Sun’s activity. This beautiful winding forest is a visualisation of the vertical magnetic field in the lower solar atmosphere extrapolated from the maps of the magnetic field (magnetograms) obtained by Solar Dynamics Observatory. The event studied is an active region 11166 that was visible at the western limb of the Sun on 4 March 2011 (Shreeyesh Biswal/Project 3)