Probing the solar corona with very long baseline interferometry

B. Soja, R. Heinkelmann and H. Schuh ()
Additional contact information
B. Soja: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg
R. Heinkelmann: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg
H. Schuh: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Understanding and monitoring the solar corona and solar wind is important for many applications like telecommunications or geomagnetic studies. Coronal electron density models have been derived by various techniques over the last 45 years, principally by analysing the effect of the corona on spacecraft tracking. Here we show that recent observational data from very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), a radio technique crucial for astrophysics and geodesy, could be used to develop electron density models of the Sun’s corona. The VLBI results agree well with previous models from spacecraft measurements. They also show that the simple spherical electron density model is violated by regional density variations and that on average the electron density in active regions is about three times that of low-density regions. Unlike spacecraft tracking, a VLBI campaign would be possible on a regular basis and would provide highly resolved spatial–temporal samplings over a complete solar cycle.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5166 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms5166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5166

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().