Awarding of the Second JOSO Prize during the 4th CESPM

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The award was presented during the

IV^th Central European Solar Physics Meeting

from Sep 30th to Oct 2nd, 2009,
Bairisch Kölldorf (Austria)

The third time the JOSO prize for solar physics was sponsored by Hans Roth, Austrian Saubermacher Company. This prize was presented by the JOSO-president, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Arnold Hanslmeier, the Vice President, Dr. Jan Rybak, Hans Roth (Sponsor) and the Vice rector of the university of Graz to
 

Dr. Alessandro Bemporad

who works at the INAF-Turin Astronomical Observatory.

The work winning the JOSO 2009 Prize studied the consequences of a large solar storm in the atmosphere of the Sun, namely the solar corona. It is well known that typically, moving from the solar surface to the corona, the temperature rises from 5800 Kelvins up to ~ 1.5 million of K; at this temperature the solar matter is in a special state called "plasma". The explanation for this high coronal temperature is actually not fully understood: this is the so called "coronal heating problem".

Nevertheless, after the eruption studied by Bemporad, the corona reached a temperature larger than 8 million of K, hence unusually high even for the solar atmosphere. An explanation for these high temperature, observed also after previous solar storms, is given now in the model proposed by Bemporad: this model suggests that the physical phenomenon responsible for solar storms and also for plasma heating, called "magnetic reconnection", is not occurring in a single place in the corona, as supposed by previous models, but is distributed on a myriad of small-scale structures, so small that they cannot be distinguished from the current instruments, creating turbulence. This also explains the observed unusually high thickness of the zone of plasma heating (on the order of 10 thousand kilometers) compared to the few meters expected under the current theories of magnetic reconnection. To improve our knowledges on this process is really important in order to better understand the origin of solar storms, which may also impact the life on the Earth.