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What I've been doing all these years
In April 2002, I started my first post-doc job, a few weeks after passing my Ph.D. exam. I'm a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (PDRF) in the Solar & Stellar Physics Group at University College London's Mullard Space Science Lab (MSSL). Like my namesake (who's also at UCL) I did my B.Sc. in Physics with Astrophysics (1995 - 1998) and Ph.D. in Solar & Stellar Physics (1998 - 2002) at The Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Because I've lived most of my life in Ulster, it was only a hop, skip and a jump down the road to go to university. I graduated with my Ph.D. on 5th July 2002, on the only beautiful summer's day for a fortnight! The solar coronal heating problem & eclipses 
The main topic of my Ph.D. was the heating of the solar corona. I've been using data taken during the 1999 total solar eclipse to get a good view of the corona so I could look for signatures of oscillation in structural features such as active region loops. The magnetic field in the corona is strong enough that the random motions of particles in the ionised gas are outweighed by the force that binds them to the magnetic field, causing loop-like structures in the corona (see the cartoon sketch, right). These loops are expected to act as waveguides for high- and low-frequency waves because they trap gas around them and are therefore denser than the material around them. This drags the Alfvén speed (vA) down inside the loops, and you get total internal reflection of these waves (like in fibre-optic cables).
Finding waves of the right (which is to say, a high enough) frequency to heat the Sun's corona isn't easy, though (well, it is research, after all!). So, I'm part of a team headed by Prof. Ken Phillips at the Rutherford Appleton Lab (Oxfordshire), and the Solar Physics group at Queen's University Belfast, which uses a novel type of instrument to look for these very rapid events. Because the Sun normally appears as a ball-shaped bright yellow surface on Earth, and the surface outshines the corona by a factor of several million, the ideal time for us to look for these waves is when the yellow surface is covered by the Moon, i.e. when there's a total solar eclipse. If you want to find about these events in more depth, there are dozens of really good resources on eclipses of the Sun (and the Moon), but one of the best is Fred Espenak's NASA Eclipse website and his alternative site MrEclipse.com. He's got excellent information there: everything from pictures of past eclipses (some of which are really breathtaking) to details on timings of eclipses and what kind of focal length and film you need on a camera to take your own pictures. But back to what I do. The instrument my collaborators and I used in 1999 in Bulgaria - and again in Zambia in 2001 - is the Solar Eclipse Corona Imaging System, or SECIS (pronounced seck-iss). The idea isn't a new one, but the technical details of the way SECIS goes about the data capture are. It uses two CCD cameras which are accurately synchronised to take around 40 pictures of the Sun simultaneously in each camera. The first camera looks at the chosen region of the eclipsed corona in the green spectral line produced by 13-times ionised iron ions, known in the trade as Fe XIV; the second camera just takes normal images of the eclipsed Sun without a filter. The unfiltered images let us correct for effects like random shaking (picked up from the ground) and turbulence in the atmosphere which makes the Sun appear to move around ever so slightly - but enough to make a big impact on our results if we don't correct for it! At the moment (July 2002), we're making these corrections. Dr Valery Nakariakov at Warwick University and some of his colleagues there are currently working on computer models of an oscillation we detected with SECIS during the 1999 eclipse. Solar Physics is often a very data-rich field to work in, and we can use data taken from the SoHO satellite mission (by the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer) to estimate the conditions (like temperature and pressure) in any part of the corona down to a few thousand kilometres across. Then we feed these estimates into computer models to see what kind of effects we can reasonably expect to see. Other research interests I also work on a couple of other solar wave-based projects. My old office-mate, James McAteer, (Queen's University) - in collaboration with Dr Peter Gallagher (NASA Goddard), Dr Mihalis Mathioudakis (my Ph.D. supervisor at Queen's University) and myself - has led work on detecting oscillations which might help to explain the fact that the chromosphere of the Sun is hotter at the top than at its base (the base being closer to the visible surface and - beneath that - the nuclear fusion core of the Sun). It's thought that transverse waves, generated beneath the chromosphere, can travel up to its upper reaches and then convert some of their energy into the longitudinal kind of wave that quickly loses its energy as heat as it nears the upper chromosphere. The observations we made, and analysed, seem to show this conversion happening. The results of this work appear to be really promising and we recently published a research letter in the Astrophysical Journal (reference 2002 ApJ 567L 165) on our findings. A follow-up paper detailing more of our findings was submitted last month (June 2002). 
Another, fledgling project - led by Mihalis Mathioudakis and Shaun Bloomfield at Queen's - is looking into flare-induced waves on very active flare stars. We know that this happens on the Sun because we've already seen it with the highly successful TRACE satellite instrument. And we've seen examples of flare oscillations on II Pegasi. So what we're looking into is how frequent these oscillations are, and what's actually happening to produce the wobbliness in the flare emission.
Contacting Me:
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