Solar Corona Rotational Tomography: Diagnostics and Applications
The corona is the atmospheric region of the Sun where the solar wind is heated and accelerated, and impulsive events such as coronal mass ejections are energized. Its observational study is relevant to advancing the understanding of the Sun-Earth relationship and space weather. In this regard, solar corona rotational tomography is an observational methodology capable of providing a quantitative description of the three dimensional distribution of fundamental parameters of the coronal plasma at a global scale. In this talk, we will describe our tomographic techniques and the diagnostics they provide applied to images of the corona taken at different wavelengths by space borne and ground based telescopes. We will show examples of results and applications, and discuss current projects.
Alberto completed his undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, and later earned his PhD in physics from the same institution. He conducted his PhD thesis research for two years at UBA and then three years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics under a Smithsonian pre-doctoral fellowship, focusing on modeling various physical phenomena in the solar corona. After obtaining his PhD, he held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics (IAFE), which is affiliated with both CONICET and UBA, in Buenos Aires. Later, he became a research scientist at IAFE, where he has been working for about 20 years, collaborating with colleagues from Argentina, the US, Europe, and Asia. His current research mainly involves studying the solar corona on a global scale using tomographic techniques, with the aim of addressing open problems in solar corona physics, such as coronal heating. Alberto has a passion for teaching at the university, where he has taught for more than 25 years, mainly to physics undergrad students and currently to students of environmental engineering. Outside of academia, his primary interests include listening to music, improving his sound systems in a seemingly endless fashion, cooking and eating, exercising and getting as much sleep as possible, and playing with his pets, Argos and Wilson.