Imaging the Sun with the Murchison Widefield Array

Details Imaging the Sun with the Murchison Widefield Array Imaging the Sun with the Murchison Widefield Array

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsh23b1547o&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SH23B-1547

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

[6924] Radio Science / Interferometry, [7509] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Corona, [7534] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Radio Emissions, [7594] Solar Physics, Astrophysics, And Astronomy / Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low frequency radio synthesis array currently under construction in the radio quiet Western Australian outback. The MWA will be the first of a new generation of interferometers to capitalize on the enormous recent technological advances in the capabilities of digital signal processing hardware and increased affordability of computing. The MWA design has been optimized to provide high fidelity, high cadence imaging capability with high sensitivity to extended emission even with a single spectral channel. This makes the MWA very well suited for studying the sun - a morphologically complex large angular size source from which the emission can show significant time and frequency evolution. The excellent imaging quality of the MWA will stem from its 512 elements distributed in a rather dense and compact manner. Most of the elements will lie within a 1.5 km radius with a few outliers extending out to 3 km. The individual elements will be arrays of 16 dual polarization dipoles arranged in a 4x4 grid and designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz band. The MWA will be able to process 30.72 MHz of bandwidth, which can be distributed in an arbitrary fashion across the observing band in chunks of 1.28 MHz. Radio observations in the MWA band are a sensitive probe of the coronal electron density and temperature distributions (Benkevitch et al. 2009). The solar images from the MWA will allow us to make significant progress in estimating electron temperature distribution in the lower solar corona, where it has remained comparatively inaccessible, and permit an independent estimation of the electron density distribution. We present simulated solar images in the MWA frequency range with precise ray tracing in the corona and account for the instrument transfer function (point spread function) for a few well accepted coronal models with a view to explore this approach. We also include features like streamers and coronal holes, and investigate how well they can be discerned in brightness temperature maps of the sun from the MWA.

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