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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Stellar and Solar Physics
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1458746
This article is part of the Research Topic White-Light Polarimetric Investigation Of The Solar Corona And Associated Dynamics View all articles

High-Accuracy Polarization Measurements of the White-Light Corona During the 2023 Total Solar Eclipse

Provisionally accepted
Yoichiro Hanaoka Yoichiro Hanaoka 1*Yoshiaki Sakai Yoshiaki Sakai 2Yukio Masuda Yukio Masuda 3
  • 1 National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Mitaka, Japan
  • 2 Chiba Prefectural Ichihara High School, Ichihara, Chiba, Japan
  • 3 Solar Eclipse Digital Imaging and Processing Network, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study measured the polarization of the white-light corona during the total solar eclipse on April 20, 2023, which occurred under high solar activity. The same instrument that was used for the 2017 and 2019 eclipse observations was employed, and despite the short duration of totality, the obtained data could be used for high-accuracy polarization analysis. We derived the brightness and polarization of the K+F corona and estimated the brightness distributions of the K-and F-coronae using polarization information. The polarization data of the corona are the key to estimating the amount of coronal hot plasma and its electron density distribution. Therefore, we examined the consistency between the eclipse data and those taken by the C2 coronagraph of the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Consequently, a systematic difference was observed; the polarization measured by LASCO-C2 was approximately 30 % smaller than the results from the eclipse. Data from eclipses, which are captured under low background sky brightness and no scattered light due to the Sun's disk, can be a good calibration source of the brightness and polarization of the white-light corona.

    Keywords: Sun, solar corona, While-light observation, Polarimetry, total solar eclipses

    Received: 03 Jul 2024; Accepted: 10 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hanaoka, Sakai and Masuda. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yoichiro Hanaoka, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Mitaka, Japan

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