Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21813209o&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #132.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Low radio frequencies (< 300 MHz) offer unique and powerful diagnostics of the Sun and heliosphere. Multiple reasons, however, conspire to make wide-band high-fidelity low radio frequency solar imaging challenging, including the dynamic and spectrally complex nature of solar emission, the large fields of view associated with low radio frequencies, and ionospheric distortion of incident radiation. Till recently this has limited the exploitation of low radio frequencies for solar and heliospheric studies. The recent and continuing advances in capacity and affordability of digital signal processing have enabled a new generation of instruments whose capabilities are well matched to the challenge of low radio frequency imaging. The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is amongst the first of these instruments and is currently under construction in the radio quiet Western Australian outback. The MWA will observe in the 80-300 MHz band and will comprise 512 elements, each with 16 dual polarization dipoles arranged in a 4x4 grid, distributed in a centrally condensed manner over a 1.5 km diameter with a small number of outliers extending the baselines to 3 km. Its compact footprint and 130,816 physical baselines provide an unprecedented high-fidelity snap-shot imaging capability for every spectral channel, with 0.5-8 s time resolution and 40 kHz frequency resolution. Solar and heliospheric science is amongst the key science objectives of the MWA. In addition to solar imaging, the MWA will exploit propagation effects like interplanetary scintillation and Faraday rotation to study the solar wind in the inner heliosphere. Here we present a brief overview of the MWA solar and heliospheric science capabilities and some early results from a 32 element engineering prototype currently operating on site. The MWA collaboration includes US, Australian and Indian institutions and the US part of the collaboration is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Benkevitch Leonid
Cairns Iver H.
Coster Anthea J.
Kasper Justin Christophe
Matthews Lynn Diane
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