This coming December, GSU’s Stuart Jefferies, will lead a multi-institutional team[1] in the opening of South Pole Solar Observatory 4 km away from the United States Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, and the installation and operation of two instruments that will record high-resolution images of the Sun at two different heights in it’s atmosphere every 5 seconds.
The targets of the project, which is sponsored by NSF’s Division of Polar programs, are to measure and characterize internal gravity waves omnipresent in the Sun’s atmosphere, identify their role in transporting energy and momentum, and to use the properties of these waves to provide a mapping of the structure and dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere. The data will also have application in a number of other areas of interest in solar physics including studies of the triggers of space weather events (solar flares, coronal mass ejections), which have direct societal impact, mapping of the Sun’s sub-surface structure and dynamics, and investigating the solar coronal heating enigma: a long-standing puzzle of why the temperature of the Sun’s atmosphere rises from about 6,000 degrees at its visible surface (the photosphere) to a few million degrees in its outer atmosphere (the corona).
[1] GSU, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Rome Tor Vergata, University of Hawaii, and the European Space Agency