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业已建立的成功合作。这个磁场控制着太阳的大气层，控制着（例如）日全食照片中看到的大尺度结构，也控制着大范围尺度上的动力学事件。它在太阳大气如何被加热到数百万度的著名问题中起着根本性的作用，它不仅构成了太阳的低层大气，而且构成了更广泛的“日光层”，包括地球。太阳的磁场远不是一种智力上的好奇心，它通过耀斑、日冕物质抛射、日冕物质抛射等空间天气事件对地球和近地环境产生直接影响。或太阳高能粒子事件。由此产生的地磁暴创造了北方和南方的光，但也有可能对从卫星和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。我们的工作将涉及潜在的磁环境-它可以在11年的太阳活动周期中发生变化，也可以从一个周期到下一个周期发生变化-以及单个事件的起源，这些事件来自日冕深处的磁能释放。该联盟的首要目标是探索日冕中磁复杂性的原因和后果-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吗？这些观测所揭示的小尺度的复杂性是否会对大尺度的输出（如耀斑、日冕物质抛射或太阳风）产生影响？该联盟内的各个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解释这些新的高分辨率日冕观测提供信息。除了探索与天体物理等离子体更广泛相关的基础物理学之外，从我们的模拟中获得的见解将在空间天气预报界得到实际应用。越来越明显的是，预测空间气象事件的发生和影响不能依靠传统的静态外推模型，而需要深入了解太阳磁场的动态行为，并可能了解其精细结构。

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.