Peter, H. and Ballester, E. Alsina and Andretta, V. and Auchère, F. and Belluzzi, L. and Bemporad, A. and Berghmans, D. and Buchlin, E. and Calcines, A. and Chitta, L.P. and Dalmasse, K. and Alemán, T. del Pino and Feller, A. and Froment, C. and Harrison, R. and Janvier, M. and Matthews, S. and Parenti, S. and Przybylski, D. and Solanki, S.K. and Štěpán, J. and Teriaca, L. and Bueno, J. Trujillo (2021) 'Magnetic imaging of the outer solar atmosphere (MImOSA).', Experimental Astronomy .
Abstract
The magnetic activity of the Sun directly impacts the Earth and human life. Likewise, other stars will have an impact on the habitability of planets orbiting these host stars. Although the magnetic field at the surface of the Sun is reasonably well characterised by observations, the information on the magnetic field in the higher atmospheric layers is mainly indirect. This lack of information hampers our progress in understanding solar magnetic activity. Overcoming this limitation would allow us to address four paramount long-standing questions: (1) How does the magnetic field couple the different layers of the atmosphere, and how does it transport energy? (2) How does the magnetic field structure, drive and interact with the plasma in the chromosphere and upper atmosphere? (3) How does the magnetic field destabilise the outer solar atmosphere and thus affect the interplanetary environment? (4) How do magnetic processes accelerate particles to high energies? New ground-breaking observations are needed to address these science questions. We suggest a suite of three instruments that far exceed current capabilities in terms of spatial resolution, light-gathering power, and polarimetric performance: (a) A large-aperture UV-to-IR telescope of the 1-3 m class aimed mainly to measure the magnetic field in the chromosphere by combining high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. (b) An extreme-UV-to-IR coronagraph that is designed to measure the large-scale magnetic field in the corona with an aperture of about 40 cm. (c) An extreme-UV imaging polarimeter based on a 30 cm telescope that combines high throughput in the extreme UV with polarimetry to connect the magnetic measurements of the other two instruments. Placed in a near-Earth orbit, the data downlink would be maximised, while a location at L4 or L5 would provide stereoscopic observations of the Sun in combination with Earth-based observatories. This mission to measure the magnetic field will finally unlock the driver of the dynamics in the outer solar atmosphere and thereby will greatly advance our understanding of the Sun and the heliosphere.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download PDF (7895Kb) |
| Status: | Peer-reviewed |
| Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-021-09774-0 |
| Publisher statement: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Date accepted: | 23 June 2021 |
| Date deposited: | 09 November 2021 |
| Date of first online publication: | 03 August 2021 |
| Date first made open access: | 09 November 2021 |
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