solar images

Technical Readiness of MeerKAT for Solar Observations and Initial Science Results by D. Kansabanik et al.

March 31, 2026

Solar radio emissions offer unique diagnostic insights into the solar corona. However, their dynamic and multiscale nature, along with variations spanning several orders of magnitude in intensity, pose significant observational challenges. To date, at gigahertz frequencies, MeerKAT (Jonas & MeerKAT Team 2016) stands out globally for its intrinsic ability to produce high-fidelity, spectroscopic snapshot images of the Sun. This is enabled primarily by its dense core, high sensitivity, and broad […]

muser

Solar Radio Wide‐Band Spectroscopy and Imaging Facilities of the Chinese Meridian Project Phase II by Yihua Yan et al.

February 3, 2026

Radioheliographs and wideband solar radio spectrographs are essential components of the Chinese Meridian Project (CMP)‐II (C. Wang et al., 2024) that aims to monitor the whole solar‐terrestrial chain of space weather events, from the lower solar atmosphere to near‐Earth space. This work introduce the CMP‐II radio instruments, including the MUSER‐L/I/H, the super‐wideband spectrographs of Mingantu and Chashan stations covering the wideband range of 30 MHz–15 GHz. The overall design, some […]

fluctuations

Tracing Ion-Scale Turbulence and Energy Cascade Rate from the Solar Corona to 1 au by E. P. Kontar et al.

January 20, 2026

The solar corona and solar wind are turbulent plasma environments where energy transfer from large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) fluctuations to smaller kinetic scales is thought to play a critical role in coronal heating and solar wind acceleration. Despite decades of research, the properties of turbulence at ion scales, where dissipation occurs, remain poorly constrained due to limited observational data. Moreover, the precise mechanisms that heat the corona, and accelerate and heat […]

Noise in Maps of the Sun at Radio Wavelengths by T. S. Bastian et al.

October 28, 2025

The Sun is a powerful source of radio emissions, so much so that – unlike most celestial sources – this emission dominates the system noise of many radio telescopes. The noise resulting from such sources is referred to as “self-noise”. Two recent papers discuss self-noise in maps of the Sun at radio frequencies formed using the techniques of Fourier synthesis imaging. Examples of radio telescopes that exploit this technique include […]

Spectroscopic Imaging of the Sun with MeerKAT: Opening a New Frontier in Solar Physics by Kansabanik et al.

April 10, 2024

Since the discovery of solar radio emission in the late 1940s, the Sun has been studied in great detail across a wide range of frequencies from a few tens of kHz to several hundreds of GHz. Solar radio emissions provide several unique diagnostics of the solar corona, which are otherwise simply inaccessible. Despite this long history of observations and studies, the Sun still harbors several mysteries. Improved observations from the […]