Publication detail

The Color and Brightness of the F-corona Inferred from the 2019 July 2 Total Solar Eclipse

BOE, B. HABBAL, S. COOPER, D. DRUCKMÜLLER, M.

English title

The Color and Brightness of the F-corona Inferred from the 2019 July 2 Total Solar Eclipse

Type

journal article in Web of Science

Language

en

Original abstract

Total solar eclipses (TSEs) provide a unique opportunity to quantify the properties of the K-corona (electrons), F-corona (dust), and E-corona (ions) continuously from the solar surface out to a few solar radii. We apply a novel inversion method to separate emission from the K- and F-corona continua using unpolarized total brightness (tB) observations from five 0.5 nm bandpasses acquired during the 2019 July 2 TSE between 529.5 and 788.4 nm. The wavelength dependence relative to the photosphere (i.e., color) of the F-corona itself is used to infer the tB of the K- and F-corona for each line of sight. We compare our K-corona emission results with the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) K-Cor polarized brightness (pB) observations from the day of the eclipse, and the forward modeled K-corona intensity from the Predictive Science Inc. (PSI) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model prediction. Our results are generally consistent with previous work and match both the MLSO data and PSI-MHD predictions quite well, supporting the validity of our approach and of the PSI-MHD model. However, we find that the tB of the F-corona is higher than expected in the low corona, perhaps indicating that the F-corona is slightly polarized-challenging the common assumption that the F-corona is entirely unpolarized.

English abstract

Total solar eclipses (TSEs) provide a unique opportunity to quantify the properties of the K-corona (electrons), F-corona (dust), and E-corona (ions) continuously from the solar surface out to a few solar radii. We apply a novel inversion method to separate emission from the K- and F-corona continua using unpolarized total brightness (tB) observations from five 0.5 nm bandpasses acquired during the 2019 July 2 TSE between 529.5 and 788.4 nm. The wavelength dependence relative to the photosphere (i.e., color) of the F-corona itself is used to infer the tB of the K- and F-corona for each line of sight. We compare our K-corona emission results with the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) K-Cor polarized brightness (pB) observations from the day of the eclipse, and the forward modeled K-corona intensity from the Predictive Science Inc. (PSI) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model prediction. Our results are generally consistent with previous work and match both the MLSO data and PSI-MHD predictions quite well, supporting the validity of our approach and of the PSI-MHD model. However, we find that the tB of the F-corona is higher than expected in the low corona, perhaps indicating that the F-corona is slightly polarized-challenging the common assumption that the F-corona is entirely unpolarized.

Keywords in English

Solar corona, F-corona, K-corona

Released

03.05.2021

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Location

BRISTOL

ISSN

0004-637X

Volume

912

Number

1

Pages from–to

1–15

Pages count

15

BIBTEX


@article{BUT171594,
  author="Benjamin {Boe} and Shadia Rifai {Habbal} and Downs {Cooper} and Miloslav {Druckmüller},
  title="The Color and Brightness of the F-corona Inferred from the 2019 July 2 Total Solar Eclipse",
  year="2021",
  volume="912",
  number="1",
  month="May",
  pages="1--15",
  publisher="IOP PUBLISHING LTD",
  address="BRISTOL",
  issn="0004-637X"
}