Bibcode
Garcia, R. A.; Roca-Cortés, T.; Regulo, C.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement, v.128, p.389-396
Advertised on:
3
1998
Citations
20
Refereed citations
11
Description
The main objective of the GOLF Experiment (Global Oscillations at Low
Frequencies) on-board the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory)
space mission is the quantitative knowledge of the internal structure of
the Sun by measuring the spectrum of its global oscillations in a wide
frequency range (30 nHz to 6 mHz). There is special interest in
detecting the low l p- and g-modes (low frequency modes) which penetrate
deeply down into the solar core. The instrument chosen is an improved
disk-integrated sunlight resonant scattering spectrophotometer. It
obtains the line of sight velocity of the integrated visible solar
surface by measuring the Doppler shift of the sodium doublet. Mainly,
two innovations have been incorporated to standard earth-based similar
apparatus (those from the networks IRIS and BISON). First, GOLF samples
each line of the sodium doublet in principle at four points on its
wings, using an extra small modulated magnetic field. This new
information enables an instantaneous calibration of the measured signal
and also opens the possibility to correct from the background solar
velocity noise. Second, the use of an extra fixed quarter wave plate,
placed at the entrance of the instrument, enables a selection of the
circularly polarized solar light. Therefore, the disk averaged solar
line-of-sight component of the magnetic field can also be obtained. This
is considered as a secondary objective of the mission. In order to study
the new information available due to these improvements in the
apparatus, the necessity of fully understanding it and the need to write
the appropriate software to analyze the data, a complete numerical
simulation of the experiment has been built. Running the simulation has
yielded two series of 12 months long each, one corresponding to a year
of maximum solar activity and the other to a year of minimum solar
activity. In this paper the numerical simulation of the GOLF experiment
is presented, its sensitivity and instrumental response calculated and a
power spectra of this two series have been obtained to show its
performance against the observations. It is shown that the numerical
simulation explains the observed spectra of the solar background
velocity signal and the oscillations to a high degree of accuracy.