Research project
Measurements of Magnetic Reconnection to/from Emerging Active Regions
When viewed in X-rays or extreme ultraviolet (EUV) the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, consists of many thin strands called loops. These loops are believed to trace out the magnetic fields, and are formed by a process called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection exchanges magnetic flux between neighbouring systems and releases magnetic energy. To understand this crucial physical process, we will analyze X-ray and EUV images and make quantitative measurements of magnetic flux involved in reconnection, using a technique pioneered by the team at MSU.
The majority of the summer was spent on adapting a pipeline of code which originally did trace data and adapting that to work with the AIA telescope. It was successful in that we are able to analyze the loop delay for these reconnection events, but there still needs further refinement to the procedure. Specifically, in loop selection from the stack plot, the procedure -- which had worked for TRACE data -- isn't identifying most of the loops causing a tedious manual selection.
Research log
Links to be updated when they're transcribed from my lab book
Week 1: IDL crash course and intro to my project
Week 2: Getting a data set
Week 3: Tracking, stackplots, and graduation
Week 4: Reading (swimming in) IDL procedures
Week 5: Fitting my procedure into the pipeline puzzle
Week 6: More loop diameter debugging
Week 7/8: Locating the bresenham slit
Week 9: The case of the missing loops
Week 10: Wrapping up the present
Resources
Elements of the pipeline: procedures being compiled and their locations[Note: As of May 2017, I may have moved procedures around. Contact me at marika.mccarthy(at)montana(dot)edu for more info], how to call it, and known issues and fixes.
Status of case 2 dataset/processing.
Here is my midterm presentation (sadly, gifs and movies aren't PDF friendly).
And here is my final presentation (sans jokes, unfortunately).
A bit of light reading on project background
Connect with me on LinkedIn