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Thyr

Simulating Microwave Emission from Solar Flares


Chris Osborne (2087801)

Project Aims

  • Increased resolution simulation of microwave (MW) emission from flares, in particular the foot regions.

    • Not resolvable by modern radio astronomy equipment.
    • Produce an initial idea of what we may see.
  • Focus on gyrosynchrotron (GS) emission.

    • First analytically described by Ramaty in 1969.
    • Mildly relativistic electrons (\gamma \sim 5) spiralling through a magenetic field.

GS Simulation

  • Computer simulation of GS Emission is not a new idea.
    • First program produced by Ramaty in an early FORTRAN.
    • We can directly trace our lineage back to that program.

Computer Simulation

  • Why now?
    • Solve numerically not analytically
    • Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful than when Ramaty wrote his original simulation.
    • Can afford to be "profligate" with computational resources (within reason)
    • The simulation of j and k is typically less than 50ms per frequency - on this laptop!

Interesting developments

  • Reanalysing the situation set up in (Simões & Costa 2006) using a multi-loop model with more accurate chromospheric and coronal temperature and density models. Hopefully allowing a direct comparision to NoRH and RHESSI data, thus confirming the validity of the models.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Simões (my advisor), and the University of Glasgow Astronomy department for supporting me and funding this project. I also wish to thank all the coders whose previous work has been invaluable.

Please also see the user's manual and my summer report.

Questions?



Chris Osborne