The Solar X-ray Limb

Abstract

We describe a new technique to measure the height of the X-ray limb with observations from occulted X-ray flare sources as observed by the RHESSI (the Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Spectroscopic Imager) satellite. This method has model dependencies different from those present in traditional observations at optical wavelengths, which depend upon detailed modeling involving radiative transfer in a medium with complicated geometry and flows. It thus provides an independent and more rigorous measurement of the "true" solar radius, meaning that of the mass distribution. RHESSI's measurement makes use of the flare X-ray source's spatial Fourier components (the visibilities), which are sensitive to the presence of the sharp edge at the lower boundary of the occulted source. We have found a suitable flare event for analysis, SOL2011-10-20T03:25 (M1.7), and report a first result from this novel technique here. Using a 4-minute integration over the 3-25 keV photon energy range, we find $R_{\mathrm{X}-\mathrm{ray}}=960.11\pm 0.15\pm 0.29$ arcsec, at 1 AU, where the uncertainties include statistical uncertainties from the method and a systematic error. The standard VAL-C model predicts a value of 959.94 arcsec, about 1$\sigma$ below our value.

12 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (6)

• The chemical composition of the Sun
• Solar Chemical Abundances Determined with a CO5BOLD 3D Model Atmosphere
• Nominal values for selected solar and planetary quantities: IAU 2015 Resolution B3
• Accurate Determination of the Solar Photospheric Radius
• Solving the discrepancy between the seismic and photospheric solar radius
• The height of a white-light flare and its hard X-ray sources

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