Sparse Bayesian Inference and the Temperature Structure of the Solar Corona

Abstract

Measuring the temperature structure of the solar atmosphere is critical to understanding how it is heated to high temperatures. Unfortunately, the temperature of the upper atmosphere cannot be observed directly, but must be inferred from spectrally resolved observations of individual emission lines that span a wide range of temperatures. Such observations are "inverted" to determine the distribution of plasma temperatures along the line of sight. This inversion is ill-posed and, in the absence of regularization, tends to produce wildly oscillatory solutions. We introduce the application of sparse Bayesian inference to the problem of inferring the temperature structure of the solar corona. Within a Bayesian framework a preference for solutions that utilize a minimum number of basis functions can be encoded into the prior and many ad hoc assumptions can be avoided. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Bayesian approach by considering a test library of 40 assumed temperature distributions.

arXiv commentNot submitted yet. Comments are welcome!

References in corpus (13)

• emcee: The MCMC Hammer
• CHIANTI - An atomic database for Emission Lines. Version 8
• Differential Emission Measures from the Regularized Inversion of Hinode and SDO data
• Thermal Diagnostics with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory: A Validated Method for Differential Emission Measure Inversions
• A Systematic Survey of High Temperature Emission in Solar Active Regions
• Solar Corona Loop Studies with AIA: I. Cross-Sectional Temperature Structure
• Constraints on the Heating of High Temperature Active Region Loops: Observations from Hinode and SDO
• Observations of Active Region Loops with the EUV Imaging Spectrometer on Hinode
• CosmoHammer: Cosmological parameter estimation with the MCMC Hammer
• The Absolute Calibration of the EUV Imaging Spectrometer on Hinode
• Can the Differential Emission Measure constrain the timescale of energy deposition
• Observations of Thermal Flare Plasma with the EUV Variability Experiment
• The Evolution of the EM Distribution in the Core of an Active Region

Cited by in corpus (5)

• How proper are Bayesian models in the astronomical literature?
• Bayesian sparse reconstruction: a brute-force approach to astronomical imaging and machine learning
• Nanoflare Diagnostics from Magnetohydrodynamic Heating Profiles
• The temperature and emission measure distribution in the quiet and active solar corona: a Bayesian approach
• An Approximate Bayesian Deep Learning Approach for Uncertainty-aware Differential Emission Measure Estimates in the Solar Corona from the SDO