SwRI: High-Fidelity Images of Sun's Atmosphere

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bystander
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SwRI: High-Fidelity Images of Sun's Atmosphere

Post by bystander » Wed Jul 18, 2018 5:41 pm

SwRI-Led Team Creates High-Fidelity Images of Sun's Atmosphere
Southwest Research Institute | 2018 Jul 18
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A Southwest Research Institute-led team discovered never-before-detected, fine-grained structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The team imaged this critical region in detail using sophisticated software techniques and longer exposures from the COR-2 camera on board NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO-A).

The Sun’s outer corona is the source of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that flow outward from the Sun in all directions. Measured near Earth, the magnetic fields embedded within the solar wind are intertwined and complex. ...

To understand the corona, DeForest and his colleagues started with extended exposures of STEREO-A’s coronagraph images — pictures of the Sun’s atmosphere produced by a special telescope that blocks out light from the bright solar disk. The coronagraph is sensitive enough to image the corona in great detail, but in practice its measurements are polluted by noise both from the space environment and the instrument itself. The team’s key innovation was identifying and separating out that noise, boosting the signal-to-noise ratio and revealing the outer corona in unprecedented detail. ...

The Highly Structured Outer Solar Corona - C. E. DeForest et al
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