Senior working with Prof. Mark Rast

Rachel McClure

The Coincident Coherence of Extreme Doppler Velocity Events with p-mode Patches in the Solar Photosphere

Observations of the solar photosphere show many spatially compact Doppler velocity events with short life spans in extreme values. To determine how granulation flows and acoustic oscillations (p-modes) contribute to the line of sight Doppler velocity, I take a Fourier transform in both spatial dimensions and in the temporal dimension and then separate the power of the two components. Counting the number of events in the original data and comparing it to synthetic sets of randomly imposed p-modes on the granulation flows, I show that the superposition of these two contributing factors to the motion of the plasma results in these extremely fast velocity events at the photosphere.

Doppler line of sight velocity

This gif shows the original Doppler line of sight velocity of the entire field of view with the granular flows and p-modes in separate plots. The granulation is the visible surface at the top of the convective motion. The p-modes are the acoustic oscillations ringing through the plasma to the visible surface.