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Reply to: Signatures of sunspot oscillations and the case for chromospheric resonances

Nature Astronomy volume 5, pages 5–8 (2021)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 20 July 2020

replying to T. Felipe Nature Astronomy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1157-5 (2020)

In our paper1, we studied a fully formed active region that was approximately halfway through its evolutionary lifecycle, and examination of the Fourier-derived spectral energies of the sunspot umbra revealed a spectral ‘bump’ at ~20 mHz. Furthermore, the spectral gradients following the ~20 mHz energy enhancement changed progressively across the umbral diameter, implying that they may reflect the intrinsic characteristics of the underlying umbral atmosphere. Numerical simulations of the sunspot atmosphere, harnessing the Lagrangian–Eulerian remap2 (LareXd) code, also revealed spectral energy variability at ~20 mHz (including changing spectral slopes). These results were consistent with the pioneering theoretical work of Botha et al.3 and Snow et al.4, allowing us to interpret these as a signature of wave resonance arising from the temperature gradients naturally occurring in the solar photosphere and transition region. At the time of publication, we recognized that we had observed strong evidence of resonance behaviour in a single, isolated sunspot structure. As a result, in the supplementary information of our paper1, we openly posed a number of key outstanding questions, and requested that the community examine sunspot wave phenomena on a statistical basis to verify how commonplace resonance signatures are.

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Fig. 1: The telescope pointing stability achieved on 2016 July 14.
Fig. 2: Spectral energies of the original and degraded He i 10830 Å observations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Christian, S. Houston and S. Krishna Prasad, who contributed to the design of the observational instrumentation setup and helped to acquire the observations in ref. 1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astrophysics Research Centre, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    David B. Jess

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, California State University Northridge, Northridge, CA, USA

    David B. Jess

  3. Centre for Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Ben Snow

  4. Science and Operations Department, ESA, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Bernhard Fleck

  5. Italian Space Agency (ASI), Rome, Italy

    Marco Stangalini

  6. INAF-OAR National Institute for Astrophysics, Monte Porzio Catone (RM), Italy

    Marco Stangalini

  7. Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Shahin Jafarzadeh

  8. Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Shahin Jafarzadeh

Authors
  1. David B. Jess
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  2. Ben Snow
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  3. Bernhard Fleck
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  4. Marco Stangalini
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  5. Shahin Jafarzadeh
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Contributions

D.B.J. designed the observational instrumentation setup and acquired the observations. D.B.J. and M.S. performed analysis of the observations utilized in the present study. B.S. designed and carried out numerical MHD simulations. All authors interpreted the observations and simulations, discussed the results, and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to David B. Jess.

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Jess, D.B., Snow, B., Fleck, B. et al. Reply to: Signatures of sunspot oscillations and the case for chromospheric resonances. Nat Astron 5, 5–8 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1158-4

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