SEI: Mining Solar Images to Support Astrophysics Research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The Coronal Heating Problem is the longest standing unsolved mystery in astrophysics. Measurements of the temperature distribution along the loop length can be used to support or eliminate various classes of coronal temperature models. The temperature analysis of coronal loops is a state-of-the-art astronomy. In order to make progress, scientific analysis requires a data set of 10 (phase A) and then 100 (Phase B) loops observed by the Extreme UV Imaging Telescope (EIT) aboard the NASA/European Space Agency spacecraft called SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory). The combination of EIT, TRACE, and SXT information provides a powerful data set that will yield unprecedented detail on the plasma parameters of a variety of coronal loop structures. The biggest obstacle to completing this project is putting the data set together. EIT has taken over 300,000 images during its 6-year (and counting) mission. The search for interesting images (with coronal loops) is by far the most time consuming aspect of this project. . Currently, this process is performed manually, and is therefore extremely tedious, and hinders the progress of science in this field. The next generation "EIT" called MAGRITE, scheduled for launch in a few years on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, should be able to take 300,000 images in about four days and will need state of the art techniques to sift through the massive data to support scientific discoveries.The contribution to solar image mining has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery in solar physics, and other applications that rely on massive image databases. Research that advances state of the art in solar physics will have a significant impact because of the following reasons: (i) the climate connection: the sun is a source of light and heat for life on Earth. Scientists strive to understand how it works, why it changes, and how these changes influence the Earth, (ii) space weather: The sun is the source of the solar wind. Disturbances in the solar wind shake the Earth's magnetic field and pump energy into the radiation belts, and can change the orbits of satellites, shorten mission lifetimes, cause power surges and outages on Earth, and hence need to be predicted. (iii) The sun as a physical laboratory: the sun produces its energy by nuclear fusion, a process that scientists have strived for decades to reproduce by involving hot plasmas in strong magnetic fields. Much of solar astronomy involves observing and understanding plasmas under similar conditions. Students are actively engaged in the research program.