Bibcode
Beck, Christian
Referencia bibliográfica
Ph.D.Thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg (2006)
Fecha de publicación:
2
2006
Número de citas
23
Número de citas referidas
20
Descripción
The most prominent features on the surface of the solar disc are the
sunspots, which have been studied since their detection in the 17th
century. Despite this years and centuries of scientific investigations,
surprisingly many facets of sunspots are not well understood. In this
thesis, the properties of a sunspots' penumbra are derived from the
observed spectra by means of an inversion, a forward modeling technique.
A method for the construction of a 3-dimensional model of the field
topology from the inversion results is presented. It offers the
possibility to build a toy-model of the spot. This allows to investigate
the relationships between the geometry and other properties of the
sunspot like flow velocities, intensity, temperature, or field strength.
The application of the procedure to time series of observations will
allow to study the temporal evolution of the geometry and the other
properties, to determine the physical processes happening and their
respective drivers.
A second part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of isolated field
concentrations in the surroundings of the sunspot. These isolated
magnetic elements are assumed to be the elementary building blocks of
the solar surface magnetism. In the turbulent surroundings of the solar
atmosphere, only relatively strong concentrations with a field strength
above 1 kG are assumed to be stable at all. Such field concentrations
produce brightenings in the G band, where a lot of spectral lines of the
CH molecule are present. Inside magnetic fields, the density is reduced,
as the magnetic pressure contributes to the pressure balance equation.
Thus, the reduced density allows to see to deeper layers of the
atmosphere with higher temperature. If the CH-molecules dissociate due
to the higher temperature, the spectral lines disappear and the
intensity increases strongly. Due to the small size of the field
concentration, the brightenings are strongly localized (''G-band Bright
Points''). In this study, we find a much larger variability of the
Bright Point properties than expected, which puts their elementary
nature in some doubt.
In the conclusions of this work, the resulting 3-D topology of the
sunspot is used in an attempt to develop a consistent picture of the
development and the fine structure of sunspots.