New insights into magnetic energy release processes
Alan Title (Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research)
The new observational capability of Solar Optical Telescope on the Hinode satellite has illustrated the prevalence of wave motions in the chromosphere and corona and the constant emergence of magnetic flux everywhere on the solar surface. New models of flux emergence and reconnection with previously existing fields provides a scenario for the nearly continuous transfer of turbulent kinetic energy in the subsurface convection to wave and ohmic heating of the upper photosphere, chromosphere and corona

The Solar Optical Telescope on Hinode has a focal plane package that contains a version of the High Altitude Observatory’s Advance Stokes Polarimeter (ASP), a 80 milli-angstrom bandpass tuneable filter, and a set of 5 to 8 angstrom filters. The imaging section records data on a 2048 x 4096 CCD detector. The 50 cm telescope and the focal plane package are diffraction limited and structures as small as 0.2 arc second (150 km on the Sun) can be resolved. The ASP can make polarization measurements with a precision of 3 parts in 10,000. By limiting the field of view image rates of better than 10 per minute can be achieved. This new data is providing a clearer picture of the processes associated with flux emergence from the scale of active regions to granules, and the presence of both longitudinal and transverse fields nearly everywhere on the solar surface.

This talk will discuss and illustrate some of the new discoveries.