[en] The near-IR line of Mn I at 15262.7 A has recently been proposed as a new tool for diagnosing the magnetic field strength and magnetic energy density associated with unresolved magnetic structures, due to the enhanced sensitivity of the Stokes I profile. In this paper, the behavior of the line, focusing on the properties of the Stokes I profile, is analyzed in detail with the aid of state-of-the-art magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of the solar surface convection. The line is synthesized taking into account that the splitting and the strength of the Zeeman components have to be calculated under the framework of the Paschen-Back theory via the numerical diagonalization of the total Hamiltonian, including the hyperfine and Zeeman contributions. The peak ratio and separation of the blue and red lobes of the emergent Stokes I profile are shown to be correlated with the magnetic field strength when no smearing is taken into account, while the correlation slightly degrades when diffraction and stray-light contamination is accounted for. We also analyze the dependence of the first two line moments with the magnetic field, showing that the first and second moments can be used to trace the velocity and the magnetic field strength, respectively. This correlation is still maintained for ground-based observations.

[en] Some recent investigations of spectropolarimetric observations of the Zeeman effect in the Fe I lines at 630 nm carried out with the Hinode solar space telescope have concluded that the strength of the magnetic field vector in the internetwork regions of the quiet Sun is in the hG regime and that its inclination is predominantly horizontal. We critically reconsider the analysis of such observations and carry out a complete Bayesian analysis with the aim of extracting as much information as possible from them, including error bars. We apply the recently developed BAYES-ME code that carries out a complete Bayesian inference for Milne-Eddington atmospheres. The sampling of the posterior distribution function is obtained with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo scheme and the marginal distributions are analyzed in detail. The Kullback-Leibler divergence is used to study the extent to which the observations introduce new information in the inference process resulting in sufficiently constrained parameters. Our analysis clearly shows that only upper limits to the magnetic field strength can be inferred, with fields in the kG regime completely discarded. Furthermore, the noise level present in the analyzed Hinode observations induces a substantial loss of information for constraining the azimuth of the magnetic field. Concerning the inclination of the field, we demonstrate that some information is available to constrain it for those pixels with the largest polarimetric signal. The results also point out that the field in pixels with small polarimetric signals can be nicely reproduced in terms of a quasi-isotropic distribution.

[en] Our aim is to present a fast and general Bayesian inference framework based on the synergy between machine learning techniques and standard sampling methods and apply it to infer the physical properties of clumpy dusty torus using infrared photometric high spatial resolution observations of active galactic nuclei. We make use of the Metropolis-Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling the posterior distribution function. Such distribution results from combining all a priori knowledge about the parameters of the model and the information introduced by the observations. The main difficulty resides in the fact that the model used to explain the observations is computationally demanding and the sampling is very time consuming. For this reason, we apply a set of artificial neural networks that are used to approximate and interpolate a database of models. As a consequence, models not present in the original database can be computed ensuring continuity. We focus on the application of this solution scheme to the recently developed public database of clumpy dusty torus models. The machine learning scheme used in this paper allows us to generate any model from the database using only a factor of 10^-4 of the original size of the database and a factor of 10^-3 in computing time. The posterior distribution obtained for each model parameter allows us to investigate how the observations constrain the parameters and which ones remain partially or completely undetermined, providing statistically relevant confidence intervals. As an example, the application to the nuclear region of Centaurus A shows that the optical depth of the clouds, the total number of clouds, and the radial extent of the cloud distribution zone are well constrained using only six filters. The code is freely available from the authors.

[en] Obtaining the magnetic properties of non-resolved structures in the solar photosphere is always challenging and problems arise because the inversion is carried out through the numerical minimization of a merit function that depends on the proposed model. We investigate the reliability of inversions in which the stray-light contamination is obtained from the same observations as a local average. In this case, we show that it is fundamental to include the covariance between the observed Stokes profiles and the stray-light contamination. The ensuing modified merit function of the inversion process penalizes large stray-light contaminations simply because of the presence of positive correlations between the observables and the stray light, fundamentally produced by spatially variable systematics. We caution that if the wrong merit function is used, artificially large stray-light contaminations might be inferred. Since this effect disappears if the stray-light contamination is obtained as an average over the full field of view, we recommend taking into account stray-light contamination using a global approach.

[en] Velocity gradients in a stellar atmospheric plasma have an effect on the anisotropy of the radiation field that illuminates each point within the medium, and this may in principle influence the scattering line polarization that results from the induced atomic level polarization. Here, we analyze the emergent linear polarization profiles of the Ca II infrared triplet after solving the radiative transfer problem of scattering polarization in time-dependent hydrodynamical models of the solar chromosphere, taking into account the effect of the plasma macroscopic velocity on the atomic level polarization. We discuss the influence that the velocity and temperature shocks in the considered chromospheric models have on the temporal evolution of the scattering polarization signals of the Ca II infrared lines as well as on the temporally averaged profiles. Our results indicate that the increase of the linear polarization amplitudes caused by macroscopic velocity gradients may be significant in realistic situations. We also study the effect of the integration time, the microturbulent velocity, and the photospheric dynamical conditions, and discuss the feasibility of observing with large-aperture telescopes the temporal variation of the scattering polarization profiles. Finally, we explore the possibility of using a Hanle effect line-ratio technique in the IR triplet of Ca II to facilitate magnetic field diagnostics in dynamic situations.

[en] We explore whether medium-resolution stellar spectra can be reconstructed from photometric observations, taking advantage of the highly compressible nature of the spectra. We formulate the spectral reconstruction as a least-squares problem with a sparsity constraint. In our test case using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, only three broadband filters are used as input. We demonstrate that reconstruction using three principal components is feasible with these filters, leading to median differences with respect to the original spectrum smaller than 5%. We analyze the effect of uncertainties in the observed magnitudes and find that the available high photometric precision induces very small errors in the reconstruction. This process may facilitate the extraction of purely spectroscopic quantities, such as the overall metallicity, for hundreds of millions of stars for which only photometric information is available, using standard analysis techniques applied to the reconstructed spectra.

[en] We present observational evidence of apparent plasma rotational motions in the feet of a solar prominence. Our study is based on spectroscopic observations taken in the He I 1083.0 nm multiplet with the Tenerife Infrared Polarimeter attached to the German Vacuum Tower Telescope. We recorded a time sequence of spectra with 34 s cadence placing the slit of the spectrograph almost parallel to the solar limb and crossing two feet of an intermediate size, quiescent hedgerow prominence. The data show opposite Doppler shifts, ±6 km s^–1, at the edges of the prominence feet. We argue that these shifts may be interpreted as prominence plasma rotating counterclockwise around the vertical axis to the solar surface as viewed from above. The evolution of the prominence seen in EUV images taken with the Solar Dynamics Observatory provided us with clues to interpret the results as swirling motions. Moreover, time-distance images taken far from the central wavelength show plasma structures moving parallel to the solar limb with velocities of about 10-15 km s^–1. Finally, the shapes of the observed intensity profiles suggest the presence of, at least, two components at some locations at the edges of the prominence feet. One of them is typically Doppler shifted (up to ∼20 km s^–1) with respect to the other, thus suggesting the existence of supersonic counter-streaming flows along the line of sight.

[en] Magnetic field topology, thermal structure, and plasma motions are the three main factors affecting the polarization signals used to understand our star. In this theoretical investigation, we focus on the effect that gradients in the macroscopic vertical velocity field have on the non-magnetic scattering polarization signals, establishing the basis for general cases. We demonstrate that the solar plasma velocity gradients may have a significant effect on the linear polarization produced by scattering in chromospheric spectral lines. In particular, we show the impact of velocity gradients on the anisotropy of the radiation field and on the ensuing fractional alignment of the Ca II levels, and how they can lead to an enhancement of the zero-field linear polarization signals. This investigation remarks on the importance of knowing the dynamical state of the solar atmosphere in order to correctly interpret spectropolarimetric measurements, which is important, among other things, for establishing a suitable zero-field reference case to infer magnetic fields via the Hanle effect.

[en] The detection of multiple mode harmonic kink oscillations in coronal loops enables us to obtain information on coronal density stratification and magnetic field expansion using seismology inversion techniques. The inference is based on the measurement of the period ratio between the fundamental mode and the first overtone and theoretical results for the period ratio under the hypotheses of coronal density stratification and magnetic field expansion of the wave guide. We present a Bayesian analysis of multiple mode harmonic oscillations for the inversion of the density scale height and magnetic flux tube expansion under each of the hypotheses. The two models are then compared using a Bayesian model comparison scheme to assess how plausible each one is given our current state of knowledge.

[en] The weak-field approximation is one of the simplest models that allows us to relate the observed polarization induced by the Zeeman effect with the magnetic field vector present on the plasma of interest. It is usually applied for diagnosing magnetic fields in the solar and stellar atmospheres. A fully Bayesian approach to the inference of magnetic properties in unresolved structures is presented. The analytical expression for the marginal posterior distribution is obtained, from which we can obtain statistically relevant information about the model parameters. The role of a priori information is discussed and a hierarchical procedure is presented that gives robust results that are almost insensitive to the precise election of the prior. The strength of the formalism is demonstrated through an application to IMaX data. Bayesian methods can optimally exploit data from filter polarimeters given the scarcity of spectral information as compared with spectro-polarimeters. The effect of noise and how it degrades our ability to extract information from the Stokes profiles is analyzed in detail.