4 research outputs found
Exploiting solar visible-range observations by inversion techniques: from flows in the solar subsurface to a flaring atmosphere
Observations of the Sun in the visible spectral range belong to standard
measurements obtained by instruments both on the ground and in the space.
Nowadays, both nearly continuous full-disc observations with medium resolution
and dedicated campaigns of high spatial, spectral and/or temporal resolution
constitute a holy grail for studies that can capture (both) the long- and
short-term changes in the dynamics and energetics of the solar atmosphere.
Observations of photospheric spectral lines allow us to estimate not only the
intensity at small regions, but also various derived data products, such as the
Doppler velocity and/or the components of the magnetic field vector. We show
that these measurements contain not only direct information about the dynamics
of solar plasmas at the surface of the Sun but also imprints of regions below
and above it. Here, we discuss two examples: First, the local time-distance
helioseismology as a tool for plasma dynamic diagnostics in the near subsurface
and second, the determination of the solar atmosphere structure during flares.
The methodology in both cases involves the technique of inverse modelling.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in the book "Reviews
in Frontiers of Modern Astrophysics: From Space Debris to Cosmology" (eds
Kabath, Jones and Skarka; publisher Springer Nature) funded by the European
Union Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership grant "Per Aspera Ad Astra Simul"
2017-1-CZ01-KA203-03556
The European Solar Telescope
The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project aimed at studying the magnetic connectivity of the solar atmosphere, from the deep photosphere to the upper chromosphere. Its design combines the knowledge and expertise gathered by the European solar physics community during the construction and operation of state-of-the-art solar telescopes operating in visible and near-infrared wavelengths: the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope, the German Vacuum Tower Telescope and GREGOR, the French Télescope Héliographique pour l’Étude du Magnétisme et des Instabilités Solaires, and the Dutch Open Telescope. With its 4.2 m primary mirror and an open configuration, EST will become the most powerful European ground-based facility to study the Sun in the coming decades in the visible and near-infrared bands. EST uses the most innovative technological advances: the first adaptive secondary mirror ever used in a solar telescope, a complex multi-conjugate adaptive optics with deformable mirrors that form part of the optical design in a natural way, a polarimetrically compensated telescope design that eliminates the complex temporal variation and wavelength dependence of the telescope Mueller matrix, and an instrument suite containing several (etalon-based) tunable imaging spectropolarimeters and several integral field unit spectropolarimeters. This publication summarises some fundamental science questions that can be addressed with the telescope, together with a complete description of its major subsystems