Research Highlights

Research Highlights

A selection of highlights culled from publications by HAO staff.

Rempel model image of Sunspots, publication highlighted by NOVA

Comprehensive Radiative MHD Simulations of Eruptive Flares above Collisional Polarity Inversion Lines

Matthias Rempel, Georgios Chintzoglou, Mark C. M. Cheung, Yuhong Fan, and Lucia Kleint—Solar flares are bursts of high-energy radiation that are associated with sunspots. NOVA highlights this newly published research that uses models to study what happens when sunspots collide and under what conditions these collisions cause solar flares.

Solar Orbiter EUI revelations

Steadiness of coronal heating

Philip Judge evaluates images from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft to determine the steadiness of coronal heating. The widely-held belief that the outer atmosphere of the Sun is in a continuous state of magnetic turmoil is pitted against the EUI data with very illuminating results.

Andy Skumanich at the 75th HAO anniversary celebration

My Rewarding Life in Science

This fascinating memoir covers the scientific life of Dr. Andrew Skumanich, starting with his family’s background and their immigration to the US. It continues with Andy's childhood, early education, his influential introduction to science, and finally his illuminating career, which started at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in the 1950s and then continued in solar physics at the High Altitude Observatory (National Center for Atmospheric Research).

Liu Fe xiii 10747 line and CME eruption

Magnetic field and plasma diagnostics for solar coronal mass ejections: A case study using the forward modeling approach

X. Liu, H. Tian, T. Toeroek, S. Gibson, Z. Yang, W. Li, and T. Samanta show results that the COronal Solar Magnetism Observatory (COSMO) Large Coronagraph (LC) can provide magnetic field measurements of CME progenitors with a high spatial resolution (2′′ pixels). By using a worse resolution (6′′ pixels), the COSMO LC observation may also be used to qualitatively study the evolution of magnetic field during the CME eruption.

The Problem of Coronal Heating

New Book: The Problem of Coronal Heating

This new book, by Phil Judge et al., offers a critical overview of the field of research, including a dive into methodologies to understand the nature of this recalcitrant problem. Armed with an up-to-date understanding of theory, instrumentation, and the developing field of machine learning, the authors offer suggestions for new, stronger methodologies aimed to generate measurable progress.

Comparison between DKIST and IRIS/SDO measurements

Magnetic fields and plasma heating in the Sun’s atmosphere

Philip Judge, Lucia Klient, Roberto Casini, Alfred de Wijn, Tom Schad, and Ali Tritschler uniquely connect magnetic fields threading the chromosphere to the overlying corona and other heated plasmas. They found no correlations between heated plasma and properties of chromospheric magnetic fields on scales below supergranules. 

high resolution images with telescopes

Advances in solar telescopes

Holly Gilbert notes that sunspot observations have been recorded for over 400 years, and eclipses were first documented thousands of years ago. Although the Sun is no longer a complete mystery, the way we observe it continues to develop, as continued technological advances uncover new mysteries for future generations to solve.

MagIon Tutorial

Cloudnative OpenScienceLabs: Effectively sharing HPC results and knowledge

Michael Wiltberger et al. present a method for publishing and sharing high performance compute (HPC) code and results in a ready-to-use interactive environment with the explicit goal to lower the entrance barrier to HPC. They call such an environment an OpenScienceLab (OSL).

Nmax observed by GOLD and NmF2 simulated by WACCM-X

Investigation of the GOLD Observed Merged Nighttime EIA with WACCM-X Simulations during the Storm of November 3–4, 2021

Kun Wu, Liying Qian, Wenbin Wang, Xuguang Cai, Joseph M. Mclnerney used the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM-X) to simulate the EIA structures during the storm on November 3 to 4, 2021 observed by the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission