Speaker
Description
The past year has been an eventful one for the SHI Collaboration. Our long term investment in developing the tools and techniques have begun to yield interesting results. The MWA solar group has now established itself globally as one of the leading solar radio physics groups. With dynamic ranges (DR) exceeding 100,000, the MWA solar images now represent the state-of-the-art at metrewaves by a large margin. Using these high DR images, we have demonstrated the ability to detect weak radio emission associated with Coronal Mass Ejections, and model them to estimate the entrained magnetic field. Our detailed studies of the well known type III solar bursts have lead to discovery of novel aspects of these bursts, leading to new insights about these systems. We have made our first forays into polarimetric studies of the solar bursts. We have also developed ways to effectively disentangle the intrinsic variations in emission from the propagation effects, which has remained a challenge. Our work has pushed the flux density of the weakest nonthermal emissions detected three orders of magnitude lower. This promises to have interesting implications for the coronal heating problem, one of our long term science objectives. I will summarise the progress which we have made, touch upon some of the projects in progress and briefly describe our near and short term objectives.
