Bibcode
Quintero Noda, C.; Suematsu, Y.; Ruiz Cobo, B.; Shimizu, T.; Asensio Ramos, A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 460, Issue 1, p.956-965
Advertised on:
7
2016
Citations
9
Refereed citations
9
Description
Polar faculae are bright features that can be detected in solar limb
observations and they are related to magnetic field concentrations.
Although there are a large number of works studying them, some questions
about their nature as their magnetic properties at different heights are
still open. Thus, we aim to improve the understanding of solar polar
faculae. In that sense, we infer the vertical stratification of the
temperature, gas pressure, line-of-sight velocity and magnetic field
vector of polar faculae regions. We performed inversions of the Stokes
profiles observed with Hinode/Spectropolarimeter after removing the
stray light contamination produced by the spatial point spread function
of the telescope. Moreover, after solving the azimuth ambiguity, we
transform the magnetic field vector to local solar coordinates. The
obtained results reveal that the polar faculae are constituted by hot
plasma with low line-of-sight velocities and single polarity magnetic
fields in the kilogauss range that are nearly perpendicular to the solar
surface. We also found that the spatial location of these magnetic
fields is slightly shifted respect to the continuum observations towards
the disc centre. We believe that this is due to the hot wall effect that
allows detecting photons that come from deeper layers located closer to
the solar limb.