Who I am, what I do

Sam Tun

Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research

New Jersey Institute of Technology

The Sun is an extreme laboratory with which I work remotely from Earth.

I am a graduate student at the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, NJIT.

We get some nice views from Earth (the image above is from BBSO, one of NJIT’s solar observatories), and from space (show

TRACE movie here).

Notice how in the TRACE movie and in this BBSO one, the movement of the material is constricted, bound to some configuration. It is, in fact, bound to the very complicated magnetic fields of the Sun.

One of the main goals of my thesis is to develop a method for reconstructing the 3-dimensional structure of the magnetic field, the temperature, and density of the solar corona.

The main instrument I am using for this investigation is the Owens Valley Solar Array. It is an radio observatory out in California, but which NJIT owns and runs. I control the array from Newark.

White light

Red light

Surface magnetic field distribution My own radio data at 3.5 GHz

Higher frequencies (smaller wavelengths) allow us to probe deeper into the corona. However, it is not easy to tell how far each level is from each other to give height results.

Attempts to do this have been made, and I will combine several of those techniques in my study.