Indian researchers have developed an approach to separate the constant background of the Solar Corona so as to reveal the dynamic corona, thus, making the study of the characteristics of Coronal Mass Ejections easier.
The basic approach of deducting the static background can significantly improve the capability of distinguishing the Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), the incident in which a huge cloud of energetic and highly magnetized plasma explodes up from the solar corona and into the space, which in turn causes radio and magnetic disturbances on the earth.
The devised approach can also bring out a clearer idea of the characteristics of the Coronal Mass Ejections and could help by making their further study easier.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are active structures in the Solar Corona and possess the capability of changing or directing the Space Weather in the near-Earth space. Given its impact, it becomes utmost important to segregate such structures and visually or automatically recognize the Coronal mass ejections through the radial distances in the images photographed using the coronagraphs.
The density of the Corona, the outermost layer of the atmosphere of Sun, reduces with distance radially outwards. As the magnitude of the corona is perceived in the white light is dependent on the thickness of the molecules in the atmosphere, it decreases rapidly. If the dissimilarity between the constant corona and transitory coronal mass ejections is not high, detection of the coronal mass ejections becomes a huge challenge.
Development Of Coronal Mass Ejections Method
A new method called the Simple Radial Gradient Filter (SiRGraF), which has been developed by Mr Ritesh Patel, Dr Vaibhav Pant, and Prof Dipankar Banerjee from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, along with Satabdwa Majumdar from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, and autonomous institutes under the Department Of Science & Technology, is capable of isolating the background, thus disclosing the dynamic corona.
This method, that subtracts the constant background, brings out the transitory corona, followed by dividing the result by an azimuthally consistent background to reduce the radial reduction in the intensity. A combination of these two steps allowed the researchers to recognize the structures such as coronal mass ejections throughout the field of view of the coronagraph images.
An interesting side of this algorithmic program is that when a large proportion of such images are to be processed, it will take just a few seconds for completion while also maintaining the image quality for scientific analysis.
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