• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.187-190
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• 2015

Data analysis and theoretical arguments support magnetic reconnection in a chromospheric current sheet as the mechanism of the observed photospheric magnetic flux cancellation on the Sun. Flux pile-up reconnection in a Sweet–Parker current sheet can explain the observed properties of canceling magnetic features, including the speeds of canceling magnetic fragments, the magnetic fluxes in the fragments, and the flux cancellation rates, inferred from the data. It is discussed how more realistic chromospheric reconnection models can be developed by relaxing the assumptions of a negligible current sheet curvature and a constant height of the reconnection site above the photosphere.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2016

The aim of this study is to describe the physical processes taking place in the solar photosphere. Based on 3D hydrodynamic simulations including a detailed radiation transfer scheme, we investigate thermodynamic structures and radiation fields in solar surface convection. As a starting model, the initial stratification in the outer envelope calculated using the solar calibrations in the context of the standard stellar theory. When the numerical fluid becomes thermally relaxed, the thermodynamic structure of the steady-state turbulent flow was explicitly collected. Particularly, a non-grey radiative transfer incorporating the opacity distribution function was considered in our calculations. In addition, we evaluate the classical approximations that are usually adopted in the onedimensional stellar structure models. We numerically reconfirm that radiation fields are well represented by the asymptotic characteristics of the Eddington approximation (the diffusion limit and the streaming limit). However, this classical approximation underestimates radiation energy in the shallow layers near the surface, which implies that a reliable treatment of the non-grey line opacities is crucial for the accurate description of the photospheric convection phenomenon.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.40.3-40.3
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• 2019

Our recent observations of the Sun through strong spectral lines have revealed several important properties of the three-minute umbral oscillations inside sunspots -- the oscillations of intensity and Doppler velocity with periods of 2 to 3 minutes. The oscillations usually occur in the form of a time series of oscillation packets each of which lasts 10 to 20 minutes, not as continuous trains. Each oscillation packet is characterized by a singly peaked power spectrum of velocity oscillation. The oscillations propagate in the vertical direction from the photosphere to the corona. In the upper chromosphere, they develop into shocks that eventually collide with the transition region. When shocks propagate along a highly inclined direction, the merging of two successive shocks can take place. Once they enter the corona, they change to linear compressional waves. In the image plane, the three-minute oscillations propagate with high speeds in the transverse direction as well, usually propagating radially outwards from a point, and sometimes accompanying spiraling patterns of Doppler velocity. These observational properties can be theoretically explained by postulating the spatio-temporally localized source of fast MHD waves at a depth of about 2000 km below the surface, the excitation of slow MHD waves via mode conversion near the photosphere, and the resonance of the slow waves in the photospheric layer below the temperature minimum, and the nonlinear development of slow waves in the chromosphere.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.307-310
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• 2005

The Solar-B is the third Japanese spacecraft dedicated for solar physics to be launched in summer of 2006. The spacecraft carries a coordinated set of optical, EUV and X-ray instruments that will allow a systematic study of the interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its high temperature, ionized atmosphere. The Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) consists of a 50cm aperture diffraction limited Gregorian telescope and a focal plane package, and provides quantitative measurements of full vector magnetic fields at the photosphere with spatial resolution of 0.2-0.3 arcsec in a condition free from terrestrial atmospheric seeing. The X-ray telescope (XRT) images the high temperature (0.5 to 10 MK) corona with improved spatial resolution of approximately 1 arcsec. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) aims to determine velocity fields and other plasma parameters in the corona and the transition region. The Solar-B telescopes, as a whole, will enable us to explore the origins of the outer solar atmosphere, the corona, and the coupling between the fine magnetic structure at the photosphere and the dynamic processes occurring in the corona. The mission instruments (SOT/EIS/XRT) are joint effort of Japan (JAXA/NAO), the United States (NASA), and the United Kingdom (PPARC). An overview of the spacecraft and its mission instruments are presented.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.167-173
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• 2012

Inter-granular Bright Points (igBPs) are small-scale objects in the Solar photosphere which can be seen within dark inter-granular lanes. We present a new algorithm to automatically detect and extract igBPs. Laplacian and Morphological Dilation (LMD) technique is employed by the algorithm. It involves three basic processing steps: (1) obtaining candidate "seed" regions by Laplacian; (2) determining the boundary and size of igBPs by morphological dilation; (3) discarding brighter granules by a probability criterion. For validating our algorithm, we used the observed samples of the Dutch Open Telescope (DOT), collected on April 12, 2007. They contain 180 high-resolution images, and each has a $85{\times}68\;arcsec^2$ field of view (FOV). Two important results are obtained: first, the identified rate of igBPs reaches 95% and is higher than previous results; second, the diameter distribution is $220{\pm}25km$, which is fully consistent with previously published data. We conclude that the presented algorithm can detect and extract igBPs automatically and effectively.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.36 no.spc1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2003

We introduce the two-dimensional spectral observations of solar flares using the Solar Tower Tele-scope of Nanjing University, China. In particular, we introduce three typical events and the methods used to analyze the data. (1) The flare of November 11, 1998, which is a limb flare. We derive the temperature and density within the flaring loop using non-LTE calculations. The results show that the loop top may be hotter and denser than other parts of the loop, which may be a result of magnetic reconnect ion above the loop. (2) The flare of March 10, 2001, which is a white-light flare that shows an emission enhancement at the near infrared continuum. We propose a model of non-thermal electron beam heating plus backwarming to interpret the observations. (3) The flare of September 29, 2002, which shows unusual line asymmetries at one flare kernel. The line asymmetries are caused by an upward moving plasma that is accelerated and heated during the flare development.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.143-149
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• 2002

In this paper we present a methodology to derive the temporal change of the magnetic shear angle from a series of vector magnetograms, with a high time cadence. This method looks for the minimum change of the shear angle between a pair of magnetograms, free from the $180^{\circ}$ ambiguity, and then accumulates this change over many successive pairs to derive the temporal change of magnetic shear. This methodology will work well if only the successive magnetograms occurred in an active region are well aligned and its helicity sign is reasonably determined. We have applied this methodology to a set of vector magnetograms of NOAA Active Region 9661 on October 19, 2001 by the new digital magnetograph at the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). For this work we considered well aligned magnetograms whose cross-correlation values are larger than 0.95. As a result, we have confirmed the recent report of Wang et al. that there was the abrupt shear change associated with the X1.6 flare. It is also demonstrated that the shear change map can be an useful tool to highlight the local areas that experienced the abrupt shear change. Finally, we suggest that this observation should be a direct support of the emergence of sheared magnetic fields.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.46.3-47
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• 2021

Recently a multilayer spectral inversion (MLSI) model has been proposed to infer the physical parameters of plasmas in the solar chromosphere. The inversion solves a three-layer radiative transfer model using the strong absorption line profiles, H alpha and Ca II 8542 Å, taken by the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph (FISS). The model successfully provides the physical plasma parameters, such as source functions, Doppler velocities, and Doppler widths in the layers of the photosphere to the chromosphere. However, it is quite expensive to apply the MLSI to a huge number of line profiles. For example, the calculating time is an hour to several hours depending on the size of the scan raster. We apply deep neural network (DNN) to the inversion code to reduce the cost of calculating the physical parameters. We train the models using pairs of absorption line profiles from FISS and their 13 physical parameters (source functions, Doppler velocities, Doppler widths in the chromosphere, and the pre-determined parameters for the photosphere) calculated from the spectral inversion code for 49 scan rasters (~2,000,000 dataset) including quiet and active regions. We use fully connected dense layers for training the model. In addition, we utilize a skip connection to avoid a problem of vanishing gradients. We evaluate the model by comparing the pairs of absorption line profiles and their inverted physical parameters from other quiet and active regions. Our result shows that the deep learning model successfully reproduces physical parameter maps of a scan raster observation per second within 15% of mean absolute percentage error and the mean squared error of 0.3 to 0.003 depending on the parameters. Taking this advantage of high performance of the deep learning model, we plan to provide the physical parameter maps from the FISS observations to understand the chromospheric plasma conditions in various solar features.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.105-113
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• 2014

We apply differential affine velocity estimator (DAVE) to the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) 12-min line-of-sight magnetograms, and separately calculate the injected magnetic helicity for the leading and the following polarities of nine emerging bipolar active regions (ARs). Comparing magnetic helicity flux of the leading polarity with the following polarity, we find that six ARs studied in this paper have the following polarity that injected more magnetic helicity flux than that of the leading polarity. We also measure the mean area of each polarity in all the nine ARs, and find that the compact polarity tend to possess more magnetic helicity flux than the fragmented one. Our results confirm the previous studies on asymmetry of magnetic helicity that emerging bipolar ARs have a polarity preference in injecting magnetic helicity. Based on the changes of unsigned magnetic flux, we divide the emergence process into two evolutionary stages: (1) an increasing stage before the peak flux and (2) a constant or decreasing stage after the peak flux. Obvious changes on magnetic helicity flux can be seen during transition from one stage to another. Seven ARs have one or both polarity that changed the sign of magnetic helicity flux. Additionally, the prevailing polarity of the two ARs, which injects more magnetic helicity, changes form the following polarity to the leading one.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.31.4-32
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• 2016

Observing the solar atmosphere with ground-based telescopes in the near-infrared has a number of advantages when compared to classical measurements in visible wavelengths. One of them comes from the magnetic sensitivity of spectral lines, which varies as ${\lambda}_g$, where g is the effective $Land{\acute{e}}$ factor of the transition. This wavelength dependence makes the near-infrared range adequate to study subtle spatial or temporal variations of the magnetic field. Spectral lines, such as the photospheric Fe I $1.5648{\mu}m$ spectral line, with a $Land{\acute{e}}$ factor g=3, have often been used in the past for this type of studies. To study the chromosphere, the Ca II IR triplet and the He I $1.0830{\mu}m$ triplet are the most often observed lines. The latter has the additional advantage that the photospheric Si I $1.0827{\mu}m$ is close enough so that photosphere and chromosphere can be simultaneously recorded with a single detector in a spectrograph. The instrument TIP (Tenerife Infrared Polarimeter) has been continuously operating since 1999 at the 70-cm German VTT of the Observatorio del Teide and has been recently moved to the 1.5-m German GREGOR. During all this time, results have been obtained concerning the nature of the weak photospheric magnetic field of the quiet sun, magneto-acoustic wave propagation, evolution with the cycle of sunspot magnetic fields, photospheric and chromospheric magnetic field in emerging regions, magnetic field in chromospheric structures such as filaments, prominences, flares, and spicules, etc. In this talk, I will review the main results obtained after all these observations and mention the main challenges for the future. With its novel polarization-free design and a complete suite of instruments aimed at simultaneous (imaging and spectroscopic) observations of the solar photosphere and chromosphere, the EST (European Solar Telescope) will represent a major world-wide infrastructure to understand the physical nature of all these phenomena.