Istituto ricerche solari Aldo e Cele Daccò, Locarno
On 18th February 2020 the Ticino parliament (Gran Consiglio) ha approved the IRSOL affiliation at the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). This important step allow to strengthen the IRSOL integration in the Swiss academic context and will offer new opportunities for the scientific development of the involved parties.
For more information please see the institutional news at USI.
This is a great moment for solar physics. The National Solar Observatory (NSO) just published the first light images obtained with DKIST: the new largest telescope in the world.
The first images show the granular structures with many details and with unprecedented resolution. DKIST observations are expected to provide a large amount of new interesting information about solar phenomena.
IRSOL collaborates with the Leibniz-Institut for Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg on the construction of the Visible Tunable Filter (VTF) to be installed at DKIST. This will allow to obtain spectro-polarimetric with unprecedented resolution, allowing scientists to study in detail the solar magnetic field, responsible of solar activity and transient solar events.
DKIST observations will provide an important opportunity to test the numerical and the theoretical models developed by IRSOL researchers in collaboration with the Institute of Computational Science at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).
IRSOL staff congratulates with NSO colleagues for this important and successful achievement.
For more information:
https://www.nso.edu/inouye-solar-telescope-first-light
IRSOL, together with the Institute of Computational Science of the Università della Svizzera italiana, organized the SOLARNET-FoMICS summer school “Solar spectropolarimetry: From virtual to real observations”, which took place from Sept. 9-14 2019 at USI in Lugano. This was the first of a series schools of the SOLARNET program of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme sponsored under Grant Agreement No 824135. The school was cosponsored by the Swiss Graduate Programme “Foundations in Mathematics and Informatics for Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering” (FoMICS).
25 students, 6 female and 19 male, from 8 countries participated in this course. Seven of these 25 were participants from IRSOL. Six participants had a doctoral degree, 15 were PhD students, and four were about to start a PhD.
The course included to a great deal hands-on exercises with radiative transfer computer programs. Students brought their own laptop along with them and had all downloaded the virtual box corresponding to their OS prior to the start of the school. They received from us a 64 GB SanDisk USB stick containing the OS for the virtual machine (Salix) and the programs and data and presentations copied on it.
Lecturers were Dr. Juan Manuel Borrero from the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics from Freiburg (D) on the basics of polarized light and the transfer equation for polarized radiation and with hands-on sessions where students compiled and ran the SIR radiative transfer code. Dr. Oskar Steiner from IRSOL lectured on the numerics and tools available for the production of simulation data, while Drs. Flavio Calvo (Univ Stockholm) and Adur Pastor Yabar (Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics) lectured on data formats and visualization of simulation data and access and handling of observational data. Dr. Renzo Rameli from IRSOL gave a lecture on high-precision polarimetry with ZIMPOL. Dr. Jaime de la Cruz Rodriguez (Univ. Stockholm) explained the basics of radiative transfer in the regime out of thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE). Students compiled and ran the STiC code for computing Stokes profiles under NLTE conditions. Prof. Rolf Krause of USI delivered a “supplementary skills lecture” about career development planing.
The school included a visit to IRSOL and to the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), where Dr. Matthias Kraushaar (CSCS) introduced to high performance computing. The last day of the school, Saturday, offered an optional excursion to Monte San Salvatore with hike to Morcote.
On April 11, 2019, the Chromospheric LAyer Spectro-Polarimeter (CLASP-II) sounding rocket experiment was successfully carried out from the NASA facility at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (USA).
CLASP-II is an international collaboration led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (USA), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ, Tokyo, Japan), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Tenerife, Spain) and the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS, Orsay, France). Additional partners are the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (ASCR), the Istituto Ricerche Solari Locarno (IRSOL, Switzerland), Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory (Palo Alto, USA), Stockholm University (Sweden), and the Rosseland Center for Solar Physics Research (Oslo, Norway).
The goal of CLASP-II was to provide new spectro-polarimetric observations of a particular layer of the solar atmosphere, the chromosphere. This complex region is at the core of several key problems, and its investigation is today one of the main priorities in solar physics research. Although there are clear indications that the magnetic field plays a key role in the physics of this region, our knowledge about the magnetism of the chromosphere is still very limited. Solar magnetic fields can be investigated by exploiting the signatures that they leave in a particular property of light: the polarization. CLASP-II succeeded in providing unprecedented measurements of the intensity and polarization of ultraviolet light emerging from the upper chromosphere. These unique observations will now be exploited to get new precious information on the strength and orientation of the magnetic fields present in this region of the solar atmosphere. This kind of information is crucial for understanding, for instance, the physical mechanisms that trigger high-energy solar phenomena, like flares or coronal mass ejections. If directed towards the Earth, these explosive events may be dangerous for astronauts, or may damage the electronic devices aboard satellites, on which our technology-dependent society strongly relies.
Solar radiation at ultraviolet wavelengths cannot be observed from ground, and for this reason a suborbital rocket experiment has been proposed within the framework of the NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program. Sounding rockets are simpler and more affordable than satellite missions, and offer a great opportunity to scientists to test new ideas and achieve rapid results. CLASP-II was launched on Thursday, April 11, at 12:51pm (local time) from the White Sands desert in New Mexico, aboard a NASA’s Black Brandt IX sounding rocket. The rocket reached an altitude of 170 miles (about 273 km), before descending by parachute. The payload was recovered in good condition. The measurement was perfectly performed during the five minutes of observation: both the pointing system and the spectropolarimeter worked very well. A first analysis of the data has shown a good agreement with the theoretical predictions.
The contribution of IRSOL to the experiment will start now, and will concern the theoretical interpretation of the CLASP-II data, with the aim of extracting as much information as possible on the magnetism of the upper solar chromosphere. This work will involve various Institutes, and will be led by Prof. J. Trujillo Bueno (the CLASP-II principal investigator of the IAC). A SNSF “Sinergia” project led by IRSOL (Dr. Luca Belluzzi, CLASP-II team member), ICS (Prof. R. Krause) and IAC (Prof. J. Trujillo Bueno), with partner ASCR (Dr. J. Stepan, CLASP-II team member), is expected to provide novel radiative transfer tools for the theoretical and numerical modeling of the CLASP-II data.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Some of the CLASP-II scientists pose for a photograph in front of the rocket on Wednesday, March 28, 2019, at White Sands Missile Range (New Mexico, USA). From left to right: CLASP-II project scientist J. Okamoto (NAOJ), principal investigator D. McKenzie (NASA), principal investigator R. Ishikawa (NAOJ), principal investigator J. Trujillo Bueno (IAC), and project scientist L. Rachmeler (NASA).
Credits: U.S. Army, Photo by Louis Rosales