SUNRISE: Instrument, Mission, Data, and First Results

Solanki, S. K.; Barthol, P.; Danilovic, S.; Feller, A.; Gandorfer, A.; Hirzberger, J.; Riethmüller, T. L.; Schüssler, M.; Bonet, J. A.; Martínez-Pillet, V.; del Toro Iniesta, J. C.; Domingo, V.; Palacios, J.; Knölker, M.; Bello González, N.; Berkefeld, T.; Franz, M.; Schmidt, W.; Title, A. M.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 723, Issue 2, pp. L127-L133 (2010).

Advertised on:
11
2010
Number of authors
19
IAC number of authors
2
Citations
241
Refereed citations
202
Description
The SUNRISE balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1 m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system, and further infrastructure. The first science flight of SUNRISE yielded high-quality data that revealed the structure, dynamics, and evolution of solar convection, oscillations, and magnetic fields at a resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun. After a brief description of instruments and data, the first qualitative results are presented. In contrast to earlier observations, we clearly see granulation at 214 nm. Images in Ca II H display narrow, short-lived dark intergranular lanes between the bright edges of granules. The very small-scale, mixed-polarity internetwork fields are found to be highly dynamic. A significant increase in detectable magnetic flux is found after phase-diversity-related reconstruction of polarization maps, indicating that the polarities are mixed right down to the spatial resolution limit and probably beyond.
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