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Abstract Waves and oscillations are important solar phenomena, not only because they can propagate and dissipate energy in the chromosphere, but also because they carry information about the structure of the atmosphere in which they propagate. The nature of the 3 minute oscillations observed in the umbral region of sunspots is considered to be an effect of propagation of magnetohydrodynamic waves upward from below the photosphere. We present a study of sunspot oscillations and wave propagation in NOAA Active Region 12470 using an approximately 1 hr long data set acquired on 2015 December 17 by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) operating at the Big Bear Solar Observatory, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. The ALMA data are unique in providing a time series of direct temperature measurements in the sunspot chromosphere. The 2 s cadence of ALMA images allows us to well resolve the 3 minute periods typical of sunspot oscillations in the chromosphere. Fourier analysis is applied to ALMA Band 3 (∼100 GHz, ∼3 mm) and GST H α data sets to obtain power spectra as well as oscillation phase information. We analyzed properties of the wave propagation by combining multiple wavelengths that probe physical parameters of solar atmosphere at different heights. We find that the ALMA temperature fluctuations are consistent with that expected for a propagating acoustic wave, with a slight asymmetry indicating nonlinear steepening.
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An overall view of temperature oscillations in the solar chromosphere with ALMA
By direct measurements of the gas temperature, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has yielded a new diagnostic tool to study the solar chromosphere. Here, we present an overview of the brightness-temperature fluctuations from several high-quality and high-temporal-resolution (i.e. 1 and 2 s cadence) time series of images obtained during the first 2 years of solar observations with ALMA, in Band 3 and Band 6, centred at around 3 mm (100 GHz) and 1.25 mm (239 GHz), respectively. The various datasets represent solar regions with different levels of magnetic flux. We perform fast Fourier and Lomb–Scargle transforms to measure both the spatial structuring of dominant frequencies and the average global frequency distributions of the oscillations (i.e. averaged over the entire field of view). We find that the observed frequencies significantly vary from one dataset to another, which is discussed in terms of the solar regions captured by the observations (i.e. linked to their underlying magnetic topology). While the presence of enhanced power within the frequency range 3–5 mHz is found for the most magnetically quiescent datasets, lower frequencies dominate when there is significant influence from strong underlying magnetic field concentrations (present inside and/or in the immediate vicinity of the observed field of view). We discuss here a number of reasons which could possibly contribute to the power suppression at around 5.5 mHz in the ALMA observations. However, it remains unclear how other chromospheric diagnostics (with an exception of H α line-core intensity) are unaffected by similar effects, i.e. they show very pronounced 3-min oscillations dominating the dynamics of the chromosphere, whereas only a very small fraction of all the pixels in the 10 ALMA datasets analysed here show peak power near 5.5 mHz. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘High-resolution wave dynamics in the lower solar atmosphere’.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1654382
- PAR ID:
- 10208005
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Volume:
- 379
- Issue:
- 2190
- ISSN:
- 1364-503X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 20200174
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2020.0174
