Remote-sensing Observations of the Corona and Solar Wind
Abstract
On June 25, 1908, George Ellery Hale used the 60-foot Tower Telescope on Mount Wilson to make the first measurements of magnetic fields in sunspots. This began a series of studies that led to Hale's Law of sunspot polarities and established the Mount Wilson Observatory as a leading center of solar magnetic field research. The magnetic aura was still present in 1962 when I began solar research there as a Caltech graduate student. Mount Wilson astronomer Horace Babcock and his father had invented the solar magnetograph, discovered the polar fields of the Sun, and observed their reversal near the 1958 sunspot maximum. Caltech physicist Robert Leighton had added new instrumentation to the Mount Wilson spectroheliograph and obtained high-resolution maps of the magnetic field. Babcock had just published his classic paper on the topology of the field and its 22-year cycle. The paper contained a sketch, illustrating the coronal field-line reconnection, which he thought must occur in response to changes of the photospheric field. Some loops flew away in the yet-to-be-discovered solar wind and other loops collapsed back to the Sun.
In this talk, I will present new observations from the SOHO and STEREO spacecraft, which show such coronal changes. Loops stretch out in the expanding corona and tear away from the Sun like drops from a leaky faucet. Simultaneous observations with different perspectives show that the detached loops are really helices in 3-D. Off-pointed heliospheric imagers allow us to track these ejections outward past planets (including Earth) and comets, and to observe their compression into a heliospheric spiral, as a consequence of longitudinal speed gradients on the rotating Sun. And XUV observations of the solar disk show brightness changes associated with reconnections high in the corona, like auroral displays in the magnetosphere.- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #214
- Pub Date:
- May 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AAS...21410701S