Magnetic Diagnostics of Coronal Rain using the DKIST
Abstract
The routine production of coronal rain in the outer solar atmosphere provides one of the finest probes we have of the coronal plasma environment and its apparent structuring. Despite the range of phenomena discovered with imaging observations, the magnetic environment hosting and marshaling rain production remains poorly constrained by observations. With the dawn of the DKIST and its advanced suite of five facility instruments, this is primed to change. The large DKIST aperture (4 meter) provides a collecting area capable of combining rapid exposure imaging diagnostics and spectroscopic observations of coronal rain with meaningful spectropolarimetric observations, which to date have been rarely achieved for coronal rain. The brightness of coronal rain in key chromospheric diagnostics (as compared to hot infrared coronal lines) offers a very significant photon advantage for conducting "cool" coronal magnetometry. This talk will discuss the building blocks for an observational framework to study coronal rain at DKIST, including how to coordinate VBI imaging, VISP spectropolarimetry, VTF 2D spectro-imaging, and DL-NIRSP IFU-based spectropolarimetry. This discussion will be guided by recent observations of neutral helium production within coronal rain that allow us to much better predict DKIST capabilities for coronal rain polarimetry. In addition, automated analysis techniques based on the Rolling Hough Transform have been developed that assist with these techniques. Coronal rain is a critical use case for early science at DKIST when it becomes operational in 2020.
- Publication:
-
42nd COSPAR Scientific Assembly
- Pub Date:
- July 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018cosp...42E3005S