Speaker
Description
The study of the Sun is an active field of astrophysics, gaining increasing attention, especially in regards to space weather and solar activity’s potentially damaging influence on Earth. The proposed Atacama Large Aperture Submillimetre Telescope (AtLAST) could become a key facility for fundamental solar physics research in the future, due to its unique combination of a large 50m aperture, large field-of-view (FoV), full polarimetry, fast scanning capabilities, and multi-wavelength instrumentation. Five key solar science cases that AtLAST could greatly contribute to were identified in Wedemeyer et al (2024), ranging from the study of the thermal and magnetic structure of the solar chromosphere to the solar-stellar connection.
Simultaneous multi-wavelength observations across AtLAST’s wavelength range (~0.3 mm - 1 cm) would probe the local gas temperature across a large range of heights in the solar chromosphere, and with the addition of full polarimetry, the magnetic field. With measurements of the local gas temperature and magnetic field at several heights across the chromosphere, AtLAST data could be used for three-dimensional tomographic reconstructions which no current instrument can offer for the solar chromosphere. Additionally, with the capability of hosting large FoV instruments, AtLAST could potentially scan the full solar disk on short time scales, a capability currently not offered in the millimetre regime.