Indian scientists have prepared a digitized Solar map for of solar magnetic field that would help the world predict the future activity of Sun-like Meteorological scientists predicts Sun.

 Indian scientists have prepared a digitized Solar map for of solar magnetic field that would help the world predict the future activity of Sun-like Meteorological scientists predicts Sun.

With this India has become the only the country in the world which has reconstructed the map for solar magnetic field from 1915 to 1965 to predict the future activity of Sun.

Sun activity is very important for astronomers and they need the information about the behaviour of the Sun in the past to forecast future Sun activity. A critical parameter of the behaviour is the magnetic field which keeps varying and governs the long-time changes in the Sun.

Though Technology today has enabled direct observations of the magnetic field, there are no direct observations of magnetic field recorded before the 1960s. This was a major hindrance in forecasting Sun behaviour. To overcome this, Indian scientists digitized the films and photographs of the sun taken at multiple wavelengths and corresponding to the past century as recorded from the KoSO (Kodaikanal Solar Observatory) of India Institute of Astrophysics (IIA).

The team of IIA, Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) used the digitized data which they called the proxy data to develop the first magnetic field map of the Sun for the period 1915-1965—which is first of its kind in the world..

The digitized map of this period corresponding to the solar cycles 15 -19 will help world scientists understand the magnetic variability and predict changes in the Sun in the future.

The research is led by Director ARIES Prof. Dipankar Banerjee and his team including Dr BidyaKarak from IIT (BHU), a Ramanujan Fellow of DST, and supported by DST and Russian Foundation for Basic Research project through an Indo-Russian Joint Research Program was published in the ‘Astrophysical Journal Letters’ recently.

“The digital data from KoSO is unique because this is the only observatory in the globe which provides the long-term uniform observations of the Sun in terms of the location and strength of its magnetic field, as well as polarity through, Ca II K and H alpha lines for more than a century.  More than 15,000 digitised images of the Sun has helped develop the magnetic field map of the period,” ARIES Director said.

The map would further help study with precision polar reversal, a unique feature of the Sun, which occurs every 11 years and shows a distinct pattern that repeats over time.