I am a senior at the University of Washington in Seattle majoring in both physics and astronomy. I have worked on three research projects prior to this REU, including modeling star forming region spectra, analyzing and identifying quasar spectra absorption lines, and conducting time series observations of variable stars and planet transits. Other than astronomy, I really enjoy hiking, running, biking, swimming, and many other things that get me outdoors. One of my biggest past times is training for triathlons, however this summer I am taking advantage of trying new things like climbing and white water rafting.
RESEARCH
Project Discription
This summer I am working with Prof. Dana Longscope on simulating solar flares. Solar flares occur when a large amount of energy is converted into X-rays, heat, and supersonic fluid motion. Prior to the flare, this energy is stored as magnetic field filling the atmosphere above sunspots and related features called active regions. The energy is released suddenly when an electric field changes the connectivity of several coronal magnetic field lines, which then retract rapidly. The fluid in these field lines move faster than the speed of sound and therefore creates shocks, which are believed to heat the plasma to tens of millions of Kelvins. In this project we will run numerical simulations to model this process.
BLOG
Doing research and exploring Montana
This week we began to learn IDL through tutorials going over the basics of graphing and data analysis. Every morning we meet to work on the IDL tutorial and afterwards I would meet with grad student John Unverferth. We uploaded all of the programs from Prof. Longcope's directory that I would need to run the solar flare simulations. For the rest of the week I played with the simulation parameters in order to understand how the different parameters affect the simulated flare.
This week I focused on trying different parameters in the simulations to see how the temperature, velocity, density, and pressure were effected.
This week I created a program that stacks the different time steps of the tube simulation. It is able to show the density in each time step in terms of either temperature, total emission measure, emission measure in the AIA 193 filter, or the emission measure in the AIA 131 filter.
I have created a graphing program that will help work with the data cubes I created. One graph will flatten the data cube into one image to show what the flare would look like by using the different time steps of the tube simulation as different tubes in the flare. I have also created a graph that will look at the temperature and emission measure along the center of the flare.
This week I was able to produce graphs of the temperature and emission measure that have values and distributions similar to the observed data!!
To ensure the results of the simulation are the same as the observed results, I used the ratio method using AIA 193 and AIA 131 emission to determine the temperature of the flare. The results of the ratio method were very close to the previous results of the total emission weighted temperature and emission!
John Unverferth ran a simulation that has a magnetic field that changed with height. I had to alter many of the programs in order to process the new simulation. I played around with looking at the velocity dispersion in the flare, but we found the results uninteresting.
I ran a high resolution simulation of my model and compared that to the low resolution simulation and the simulation with a changing magnetic field. The order of magnitudes look good on the graphs, but there are some new features on the graphs that had not been there before. I know it has to do with me altering the code to handle John's run, but I am not sure what is causing these features.
With some of the final runs, we realized there were a few errors in the run including a rotation of axis that was not correct, and some distorted frames of at the end of the simulation run. It took several runs to make sure everything was correct. I then reran all of the runs and recreated all of the data cubes one final time.
To finish up the summer I have been creating final drafts of my graphs for my final presentation.
