Solar magnetic evolution and complexity: Dundee-Durham consortium

该项目延续了邓迪大学和达勒姆大学研究人员在太阳磁场结构和动力学方面的成功合作。这个磁场支配着太阳的大气层，既控制着在日全食照片中看到的大尺度结构（例如），也控制着大范围尺度上的动态事件。它在太阳大气如何被加热到数百万度的著名问题中起着基本的作用，它不仅构成了太阳的低层大气，而且还构成了环绕地球的更广泛的“日球层”。太阳的磁场对地球和近地环境有着直接的影响，这远远不是一种智力上的好奇心，它通过空间天气事件，如耀斑、日冕物质抛射或太阳高能粒子事件，对地球和近地环境产生了直接的影响。由此产生的地磁风暴产生了北极光和南极光，但也有可能对从卫星、通信系统到电网和管道等工程系统造成破坏性的经济影响。我们的工作将解决潜在的磁环境-它可以在11年的太阳周期内以及从一个周期到下一个周期发生变化-以及单个事件的起源，这些事件来自太阳日冕深处的磁能释放。该联盟的首要目标是探索太阳日冕中磁性复杂性的原因和后果-这是一个远离静态平衡的系统。我们能解释最新一代的高分辨率观测结果吗？这些观测所揭示的小规模复杂性是否会对耀斑、日冕物质抛射或太阳风等大规模输出产生影响？财团内的各种项目将为一系列不同的设置进行理论和数值建模，精心选择以模拟太阳日冕的基本特征，包括活动区域（太阳黑子周围），日冕环，开放磁场线（延伸到太阳系），以及太阳耀斑，日冕物质抛射和太阳风的来源。我们的几个模型将直接“数据驱动”，从望远镜中获取输入，包括最近数字化的过去100年的历史数据。来自最新的地面和卫星望远镜以及帕克太阳探测器的各种观测结果将用于验证我们的模型。我们对小尺度行为的研究将为这些新的高分辨率日冕观测提供解释。除了探索与天体物理等离子体更广泛相关的基础物理学外，从我们的模拟中获得的见解将在空间天气预报领域得到实际应用。越来越明显的是，预测空间天气事件的发生和影响不能依赖于传统的静态外推模型，而是需要对太阳磁场的动态行为和潜在的精细结构有深刻的理解。

This project continues an established and successful collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Dundee and Durham on the structure and dynamics of the Sun's magnetic field. This magnetic field dominates the Sun's atmosphere, controlling both the large-scale structure seen (for example) in total eclipse photographs, and also dynamical events on a wide range of scales. It plays a fundamental role in the celebrated problem of how the solar atmosphere is heated to millions of degrees, and structures not only the low atmosphere of the Sun but also that of the wider "heliosphere", encompassing the Earth.Far from an intellectual curiosity, the Sun's magnetic field has a direct impact on Earth and the near-Earth environment, through space weather events such as flares, coronal mass ejections, or solar energetic particle events. Resulting geomagnetic storms create the Northern and Southern lights, but also have the potential for damaging economic impacts on engineered systems ranging from satellites and communication systems to power grids and pipelines. Our work will address both the underlying magnetic environment - which can change both over the 11-year solar cycle and from one cycle to the next - but also the origins of individual events, which come from magnetic energy releases deep in the solar corona.The overarching aim of the Consortium is to explore the causes and consequences of magnetic complexity in the solar corona - a system that is far from static equilibrium. Can we explain the latest generation of high-resolution observations? Does the small-scale complexity that is being revealed by these observations have consequences even for large-scale outputs such as flares, coronal mass ejections, or the solar wind? The various projects within the consortium will carry out theoretical and numerical modelling for a range of different setups, carefully chosen to model the essential features of the solar corona, including active regions (around sunspots), coronal loops, open magnetic field lines (that extend out into the solar system), and the sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the solar wind. Several of our models will be directly "data-driven", taking input from telescopes, including recently digitized historical data for the past 100 years. A variety of observations from the latest ground-based and satellite telescopes, and Parker Solar Probe, will be used to validate our models. Our study of small-scale behaviour will inform the interpretation of these novel high-resolution observations of the corona. As well as probing fundamental physics relevant more widely to astrophysical plasmas, the insight gained from our simulations will have practical application in the space-weather forecasting community. It is becoming apparent that forecasting the occurrence and impact of space weather events cannot rely on the traditional static extrapolation models, but requires a deep understanding of the dynamical behaviour, and potentially the fine structure, of the Sun's magnetic field.