The solar corona: modeled, discretized, visualized

In this dissertation, stellar atmospheres will be mathematically described together with the establishment of a discrete model for simulation purposes. Simulation of stellar atmospheres, such as that of our own sun, is a common task in CGI for scientific visualization, movies and games. A fibrous volumetric texture is the visually dominant feature of the solar corona---the plasma that extends from the solar surface into space. These coronal fibers can be modeled as magnetic filaments whose shape is governed by the magnetohydrostatic equation. The first goal of this dissertation is to rigorously establish and derive the mathematical model to solve this equation. The second goal of this dissertation is the discretization of the established model and to derive an algorithm to solve the magnetohydrostatic equation computationally. The discrete magnetic filaments being introduced here provide a Lagrangian curve representation whose initial configuration can be prescribed or generated from magnetic flux surface maps given as scalar magnetic flux boundary data on the sun's surface. Subsequently, the shape of the filaments is determined based on a variational formulation. Lastly, we apply the entire model to output visual renderings of the whole sun and put the output to various tests. The fidelity of the method is demonstrated by comparing the resulting renderings with actual images of our sun's corona. A pipeline for solar imagery creation is built.

Author dc:creator

• Padilla, Marcel

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Schröder, Peter
• Pinkall, Ulrich

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-18889

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/20091